MINNESOTA

This ad"van"ture finds us heading to Minnesota. Why? You may ask. Well, I will tell you. We have a nephew, who just happens to be a Grillmaster, who lives in Avon, Minnesota, and he very generously invited us to his fourth annual BBQ, and that's an offer we just couldn't refuse. I know he's a Grillmaster because that's his profile picture on FB, AND we have tasted his BBQ, so that's how we know.

We headed out about 1:00 on Wednesday afternoon, which was a little later than we had originally planned but got delayed a bit because of Anthony wanting to give blood and someone offered Anthony two free old Schwin bicycles, so back home we went to put them in our basement that holds a "few" other treasured bikes that take up space in our basement. I will not tell you exactly how I feel about these treasures, so I may save that for another day.

Anyway, of course to get to Minnesota, we had to go through Kentucky:

 

And Illinois:

Once in Illinois, we made our way to the first rest stop we found that was open.You find the most interesting people at rest stops. When I opened up the back door of our van, a woman behind me said, now that looks pretty nice, as she was admiring our bed set up. She told us that she was driving a van and they also had another van traveling together heading to Michigan from Texas. There were ten people total in the two vans, which held two adults and 8 youngsters, ages ranging from 1 to 18. And guess what? They slept in those vans at a truck stop the night before. It was about 8:00 pm when we saw her and they had 6 hours to go. Ooohhh mmaaannn. Bless'em.

(Those are their two vans to the left of ours.)

We woke up this morning in Vandalia (or should I say "Van"dalia) IL. We want to make sure we take a tour to Bloomington, MN to see The Mall of America, and there really isn't a direct route, so we turned on our GPS and it took us through the Village of Ramsey, IL, The Home of Tex Williams. 

Well, if you don't know who Tex Williams is, according to Wikipedia, he is best known as an American Western swing musician. His biggest hit was the novelty song, "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)", which held the number one position on the Billboard charts for six weeks in 1947. I wonder if anyone will be making a remake of that song any time soon?

Traveling on the back roads is so much more interesting than the interstates. You find all kinds of trinkets of Americana along the way. 

I thought this was going to be the end of this blog, but we found this very unique Kroger in Nokomis, IL. Wow. Love it.