Day 24 West Union to Dodgeville

Found out that we should have taken a PhD in Tractor or made some source checking when I wrote about the Charles City tractor yesterday. I was not aware that there was a feud taking place with Iowa as the battleground about who invented the tractor. One of the first towns we came to today was Froelich named after an inventor who lived here around 1900. He more or less invented everything which Edison and Benjamin Franklin did not invent – from Froelich Museum’s website: “John Froelich is listed in the Iowa Inventors Hall of Fame. He is credited with having invented many things: a washing machine, dish washer and dryer, a mechanical corn picker, and the mounting of a gasoline engine on his well drilling outfit. It is this invention that led him to modify the gasoline engine for a tractor for threshing. John Froelich also invented the first air conditioner, which went on to become the Carrier Air Conditioning Company”. Froelich’s tractor company later became part of John Deere and I even sense that the big and mighty John Deere is on a mission to write out yesterday’s Hart and Parr tractor for history, see this time line:

Mississippi

As written earlier the eastern border of Iowa is defined by the Mississippi River. I had played Mississippi Kisses for Troels this morning. I have been looking forward to seeing the river and think of the concert Charlotte purchased tickets for in Hollywood Bowl while we were still on family vacation. Charlotte did not know Leon Bridges, she just thought we should try a concert in the outdoor arena. Try to find it on your music streaming app. As opposed to Missouri which we crossed at a lake, you had the sensation of crossing a huge river used for both leisure activities and commercial purposes. In Prairie du Chien on the Wisconsin side there were several RV campgrounds with boat landings.

• 

• 

Wisconsin is slightly more hilly than Iowa but much curvier, if you can use that word of a landscape. Rolling hills and a lot of trees cut through the fields. Dairy farms are now seen from the road and we could agree that it resembles a Danish landscape.

Amish

For days we have seen a sign like this in the roadside:

but without seeing any horse carriages. Today we overtook a cart with a driver and two passengers. There are more than 15,000 Amish in Wisconsin. We saw five or six of them today.

First night in Wisconsin and the coming days

Tomorrow we hope to meet Jakob from work. We are starting to have a little sore muscles after having run out of hydrolysate in South Dakota. Thereafter we will head southeast towards Chicago. If we can make it down there by Tuesday evening we plan our second rest day to be in Chicago Wednesday before the final 1000 miles towards New York.