We took a brief walk to a coffee shop before we left. Madison’s Cargo Coffee had a vibe a bit too over-the-top hip for my taste. I’m not sure why I felt like this in a place where I should have felt perfectly at home; I’ve been accused of being a coffee snob for nearly a half century now. Somehow, waiting on line for my coffee, ordering, and asking where to find the cream made me feel like a country bumpkin newly arrived in the big city, scratching his head at words like macchiatto, and spelling espresso with an X. I just didn’t feel savvy enough for this place. The staff wasn’t rude or snobby…it seemed the beautifully curated decor, signage and art in this place were looking down at me, judging. I felt like Belshazzar from the Bible when he saw the writing on the wall: weighed on the scales and found wanting. Or would have felt if the prophet Daniel had been a smug barista. It was probably all my imagination; an artifact of a brain badly in need of caffeine. But they do brew a damned good cup of coffee.
Weary of what had started to feel like a routine involving days of driving and early evenings walking around parks we headed out, eager to reach Minneapolis that afternoon. We did take a brief detour. Middleton, Wisconsin, about ten miles Northeast of Madison, is home to the National Mustard Museum and we were in the mood for some condiment tourism.
The museum manages to be comprehensive and monomaniacal about Mustard without ever taking itself very seriously. The ground floor is pretty much a gift shop featuring an insanely huge variety of mustards for sale, a mustard tasting bar and lots of tourist souvenir stuff, some of it mustard-related. The museum displays are downstairs. Shelves hold thousands of mustard jars and bottles from around the world, the world’s only mustard vending machine, artwork, audio-visual presentations, and an exhaustive collection of mustard-related memorabilia. We left with several jars of Dijon, a spicy Japanese Wasabi, and a souvenir coffee mug.
We sped due west across rural Wisconsin to the twin cities. Dairy farms rolled over gentle hills, extending for miles. They were jaw-droppingly large compared to the postage-stamp size farms we knew in Vermont. Pressing on, we easily resisted the theme parks and other meretricious attractions of the Wisconsin Dells. More tempting were the fantastic sandstone ledges, heaps, castles, bluffs, canyons and hoodoos we could see from the highways. These glacier-carved sandstone formations looked like they belonged in Bryce Canyon or Yellowstone, not in the middle of Midwestern farmland. But we rolled on past, eager to see Joanna’s son Sam and his fiance Meagan. We crossed the St. Croix river into Minnesota, and a few minutes later arrived in the neighborhood the Minneapolitans call “Nordeast.”
Is that you making the jump at Stand Rock? 😉