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Wednesday turned out to be quite a day. We got up at 6:30 mountain time in Keystone, South Dakota. We drove all day, expecting to camp around La Crosse, Wisconsin for the night.

We made a side trip into Mitchell to see the Corn Palace, a building with Kremlin-style domes on towers painted in brilliant green and yellow, and the outside walls completely decorated in a mosaic depicting western scenes. The mosaic is made entirely of corn, and the scenes change periodically, or so I understand. I suspect that birds love to eat the walls, but wouldn't know for sure.

There was a street festival blocking off our access to the Corn Palace. We could drive past it a block away, but there was no way to even get a picture. Still, you can't make up something more unusual that this. Except Wall Drug, of course. We were there on Tuesday, I'll talk about it later.

Anyway, we hit the road at 7:50 AM from our campground, mountain time. By the time we got to La Crosse it was 8:45 PM, central time. We felt like we could keep going, so we zipped into the tourist information rest area, grabbed a campground guide to Wisconsin, and kept on driving. I contacted a place near Madison and they said they had spots, and we could set up and register in the morning. She warned me it was a little swampy in the second and third loops, but we could stay in the first loop. She joked that Wisconsin had been getting a lot of rain lately. We hadn't seen the news, we didn't know what was happening. We've been living in an area of the country that's on fire, for crying out loud!

We got there at 11:50 PM. Theresa and I walked through the first loop to find a spot and were amazed. The entire place was under several inches of water. There was intense lightning and thunder all around. There was no way we could drive back to any sites. We would never get out. It was insane.

We drove to a nearby gas station that was closed and took an hour nap. By then another intense thunderstorm was moving in. We had no way to camp, didn't care to buy two hotel rooms to put six people in a hotel, and didn't want to drive through Chicago during a storm during the day with all the traffic. So Theresa and I took one hour shifts and drove through the night. It was pouring so hard by the time we left the first toll booth in Rockford that you could hardly see. We rarely went faster than 50 mph, but there was almost no traffic, all the construction crews were home, and we could see our lanes without much trouble. Besides, it was just about as light as day, since the city lit up the sky so much.

I drove from the toll oasis by O'Hare through the Dan Ryan to Portage, Indiana. Despite the torrential rains and huge blasts of lightning it only took me about 30-40 minutes to get from O'Hare to the Indiana line. We kept up the one hour shifts until the kids woke up, just after 7 AM eastern time. When I bought gas in Portage we had traveled exactly 995 miles from our campground in South Dakota.

Theresa drove from about Saugatuck to home. We got here at 8:55 AM. The kids did all the unloading while I slept until 12:30 and Theresa slept until about 2. We're slowly doing laundry and some other chores, like buying groceries, getting the big box of mail from the post office, and getting the dog.

We're exhausted but home and safe. It has been an incredible trip. I'll put a few more entries up on the blog explaining some of what we did the last few days. We were gone until very late and were just too tired to do much on the internet after such full days of activities.

Back to work on Monday. I can't wait to go on vacation again.