#5BDA Rush Week

Five years ago, the first leg of the Grumpy Bulldog Does America adventure I spent pretty much the first week going from Michigan to Seattle.  I mentioned on Monday the first day I went in the opposite direction and slightly north to Lexington, Michigan.  So the next day I went across the state.  Though first I went back to my storage unit for a few things like an extension plug.  Then I wound up in Stevensville, basically on the Lake Michigan coast near Benton Harbor.  That evening I wandered around and got some pretty OK shots of the lake at sunset.

The next couple of days I put a lot of miles between me and Michigan, going through Indiana to the northern suburbs of Chicago, and then after stopping for the night I went all the way through Wisconsin to Rochester, Minnesota, the home of the Mayo Clinic.  If I'd gone to Minneapolis I could have found the guys from MST3K/Rifftrax, but instead I went to South Dakota, to the town of Mitchell, where I saw the outside of the "Corn Palace" but the inside was closed.  So sad.

People chided me for not doing enough touristy stuff but really for me the point wasn't to see the World's Biggest Ball of Twine and shit like that.  I mean in the strictest sense this wasn't a vacation.  This was an epic journey!  Or something like that.

But since it wasn't too far out of my way I went to Wall Drug, which...wasn't really that impressive.  I suppose I should have at least got a bumper sticker for my car.  Oh well.

The next day I actually saw something impressive: Mt. Rushmore!  Like the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY it's a cool place but it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere so it's not something you really want to do more than once. 

After that it was a lot of mountains and cold through Montana, a corner of Wyoming, and the tip of Idaho.  It was three pretty boring days unless you really like mountains.  But at least the weather got a little better once I got to Washington state and Spokane.

And from there it was a long, winding haul to the Seattle suburb of Kent.  But at least I had finally made it.

I'll get into that next week.  You can hardly wait. lolz