Day 13

We are now in Wisconsin and only a few

days away from the end of our trip. 

We finished our drive through Minnesota stopping only to see the Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, which is also the town at the half way point of I-90:

We also passed through the Minnesota Memorial Hardwood State Forest:

We seem to have reached the point where we are eating most our meals in the car and giving up any pretense of civilized behavior. For example, this is how the back of our car behaves if we are stopped for more than 20 seconds:

After lunch we arrived in rainy Wisconsin Dells but we were saved by the fact that they do have an indoor water park - Chula Vista, where we spent the next FOUR hours:

Let me just say that if you are doing a two plus week car trip with three kids, then taking half a day to let them go nuts at a water park is invaluable. I am pretty sure that this was the highlight of the entire trip for all of them and maybe also for Mike, who basically turned into my fourth kid while we were there.

Not suprisingly everyone was famished afterwards. We got dinner in town and then dessert: 

For some reason I agreed that we should stop at an arcade on our way home. This was not my wisest of moves but the kids had a great time:

This is Heath on the gyro ride where I had to look away because I thought I would vomit but he was laughing the whole time:

Tomorrow we drive as far as we can to Ohio. Yet, to draw another comparison to the Corps of Discovery (in 1805) it is becoming clear to me that this journey cannot be done in the time we had hoped for and so we have set our sights on Fort Wayne, Indiana for our final destination tomorrow and will make it to Ohio on Wednesday morning.