A Long Drive to Chicago

We left Fargo early this morning to drive to Chicago. This was our longest driving day of our entire road trip. While it was a long day, it was intersting to make such a trip. We ate breafast in Fargo, stopped for coffee in Minnesota, ate lunch in Wisconsin, and had dinner in Chicago. It's insane to think that we have been in 4 states today, and not like when you're in Washington, DC where you can be in Maryland and Virginia and other border states, for example, but driving through fairly large states. We went from flat prairie land like home to many more lakes in Minnesota with also a number of pro-life billboards to lush, rolling and high, rocky hills in Wisconsin. What also distinguishes Wisconsin is all the signs for different cheese related things, cheese farms and stores and restaurants. It is the dairy province after all.

In terms of flora and fauna, I continued to see red-winged blackbirds and hawks as well as Brewers blackbirds. I also saw some kind of white herons, both in flight and in the water, and a type of brown bird that looks similar to sandpipers or plovers but hung out on the side of the highway, so I don't know what they were as they certainly weren't hanging out near any shores. Many parts of the highways in Wisconsin are also lined with what appear to be orange daylilies, blue flax, and Queen Anne's lace. It was hard to get photos of those as we were whizzing by at 70 mph (110 km/h) on the interstate,  but I have captured some of the flowers and rocks to give you an idea. I would recommend clicking on the photo so you can see the larger version of it to be able to make out some of the flowers. Unfortunately, due to the angle of the sun, the photo is a bit underexposed, and there isn't much you can do to fix that. 

What made the drive longer was all the road construction we encountered and congestion from right before hitting Madison, It really slowed things down, and of course stuff like that will always happen on the day when it`s your longest commute, right? Must be Murphy's law.

Chicago deep-dish pizza

We were pretty tired when we got here, but we we went out and tried some deep dish pizza at a place close to our hotel. It was pretty tasty. Now I want to try the restaurant at home and see if they actually make a decent Chicago deep-dish pizza, as the restaurant is called.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post was the number of Luthern churches in the area. I like observing these kinds of entities while travelling because it gives you an idea of the history of the region and who settled there. There German names on businesses and a Scandinavian heritage centre that we passed, all indicators that my assessment of the German (and as it turns out, Scandinavian) settlement here was correct, based on the existence of these churches. We actually also passed by a billboard advertising lefse, which is a Norwegian flatbread, for those of you that might not be familiar with it. There was just that one region around Rugby where there were English settlers, but a large portin of North Dakota and Minnesota appear to have mainly Germanic origins.