Journeying Geographer: Day 12: Wisconsin: America's Dairyland

Another wintry day in the Northwoods. My friend took a shuttle to the Duluth airport at 6:00 a.m. so he could fly back to Oregon. That means I'm on my own for the next month, until I pick up my wife and youngest daughter at the Atlanta airport October 13th. Since the appointment for my oil change and headlight adjustment was not until 12:45, I had a leisurely breakfast of diced ham, scrambled eggs, and potatoes at the hotel, followed by a soak in the hot tub, and then a nice hot shower. The hardships of life on the road!

I had to check out of the hotel by Noon, so I arrived a full hour early for my oil change, but they got me right in and I was done by the time I was supposed to start. Midwest hospitality at its finest! After grocery shopping at SuperOne Foods and a quick self-serve car wash in Superior (had to rid the front of my rig of the bugs), I was finally on the road headed east.

Today was completely overcast with occasional rain showers, so not the best conditions for photos, but I still managed to shoot nearly 150 (fewer than a third of what I took yesterday!). I mostly tried to capture a sense of the places I traveled through, especially the cultural geography: houses, schools and other public buildings, churches, and so on. Ironically, while looking for Lutheran churches to photograph in Ashland (WI), I found everything but that! I finally resorted to Google maps and found some less than a mile away. The European settlers who came to the Upper Midwest and Great Plains (North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) were primarily from Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, and Finland in particular), and nearly all were Lutheran. The climate, topography, and vegetation of this region is very similar to northern Europe, and was a natural place for them to settle and live in a way they were accustomed to. Others followed family members and friends here in a chain of migration, and those groups of people and their cultural characteristics (such as housing styles, religious affiliation, and food preferences) still prevail.

I only traveled another 121 miles today (making 2,527 miles total), ending up in Ironwood, MI (pop. 5,200), which is right on the Wisconsin-Michigan border. Still, three states in one day isn't bad, eh? You betcha!

Denfeld High School, Duluth. Looks just like the high school I attended. . . . Oh, wait, no it doesn't.

Downtown Duluth as seen from Superior, WI waterfront. Duluth is only about 2/3 the population of Salem, OR.

Yogi Berra infamously said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!" So I did.

This is what salting the roads in the winter can do to a car.

Homes in an older section of Duluth (near Denfeld High School).

Gronk.

I'm guessing that the food at Gronk's is better than the wine at this winery. Just a hunch. It seemed to be located on the wrong side of the tracks (literally and figuratively). Maybe the wine is served in a bottle in a brown paper sack?