The midwest is about people, and neighborhoods

From Joan: 7 days a week . . . 24 hours a day?

It’s a treat to be out on the road, seeing the sites and reflecting on the experiences, but 24/7 together can be a little too much! Even when broken up with pickleball, golf and biking there’s something missing when you don’t have company to share it all with.

So, visiting friends along the trip has been a highlight. We stopped in the idyllic, albeit flat, suburb of Naperville, IL to see my friend Theresa and her husband Eric. We had a delicious farm to table meal, laughed, walked and enjoyed Theresa’s cookies.

After our daunting HipCamp stay in the East Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago we were welcomed to Kelly and Doug’s brand new lakefront home in the adorable town of Culver Indiana. Never having been to Indiana I was taken aback by the lush green surroundings, quaint downtown and the “Summer never ends” attitude of their neighbors! We biked around the lake, got a tour of Culver Military Academy and Doug’s wood working shop, followed by a boating cocktail tour of the lake front homes. Dinner, more laughing and wine only to be topped by golf the next morning. WHEW!

With hosts such as these two couples Randy and I were tempted to pull a U-Turn and repeat the drill! Thanks for welcoming us into your homes and taking the time to share your communities.

From Randy: Ups, downs & more ups in the flat Midwest

Randy: Wisconsin, Chicago, and Indiana turned out to be one giant string of examples of why I LOVE traveling with Joan. If I resist my usual urge to play it safe and instead just follow her lead, great moments happen. Now, not all of those are nice, neat, smiling instagram moments. But they ARE great nonetheless.

Here are FIVE of our ups and downs this week.

Westby, Wisconsin: Nothing is sacred when you’re with Joan.

In the middle of the night, if the toilet says it’s full, it might not really be serious. I mean, you never know. It COULD just be pulling your leg. . . . uh, maybe?? . . .

So, you know how, when you pour water into an already full glass, the result is a total mess . . . well the same thing happened with our little toilet. As a result, there’s a small Wisconsin town that very graciously allowed us the time, space, and garbage facilities to do a really nasty clean up. It was gross in ways that diaper changing never was. A sewage spill in our little toilet cabinet. I have a video of it, but really I can't bring myself to show it. It's just too foul.

Afterwards though, we sought out a coffee shop which happened to have chair massages. So . . . after we laughed and gagged and choked the whole way through the clean up, we got massages and lattes! That's a "Joan thing". Even big messes turn into good times.

And a big thanks to the people of Westby. We're really sorry about the smell!

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Chicago, IL: Uncomfortable moments can be amazing if you connect with the people.

East Garfield Park is a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side and we booked a “camping” spot in a backyard “farm” there thru Hipcamp. We arrived to find that our "farm" was the backyard of a 3 story townhouse next to the train tracks in a poor (¾ of the residents make less than $50k/yr), high crime neighborhood (3rd highest crime rate in Illinois). Caucasians have increasingly moved to the neighborhood, but are still only 6% of the population, so we stuck out like sore thumbs. While I was feeling far outside of my comfort zone and starting to wonder where else we might go, Joan met some folks. Carter and Scott were there cleaning up after a memorial service and when I brought the van back around the block they were already Joan's best friends. They talked us through the neighborhood and the farm and even rolled a car out of the way so we could squeeze the van past the chickens and goats.

After that, we met a transit authority officer who helped us get our tickets for the ‘L’. Then a lovely older fellow in a Cubs jersey guided us to the right train and rode with us all the way to Wrigley. Then, we met all kinds of “friends” in the bleachers drinking beer (that's a Wrigley thing). When we arrived back at the farm just before dark, we walked the 6 blocks from the ‘L’ without incident.

In our tiny little backyard "farm" there were EIGHT other groups spending the night. They were all shapes and colors (tho mostly punk rockers & metalheads in town for concerts), but all lovely people and considerate neighbors. We slept through the trains just fine, but in the end were awakened by the rooster. A true “farm” experience.

We loved ALL the neighborhoods we found in Chicago. It seemed like everywhere we looked there were kind and helpful people!

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Target Field, Minneapolis, MN: "Get deep fast"

My old friend Greg used to say that this was his conversational strategy. Be like Jerry Rice and "get deep fast". No one does it like Greg did, but Joan is close. At first glance, the guy sitting next to us at the Twins game looked like an oddball with a Kid Rock fetish, complete with the eye liner, long hair and bandana. After Joan started chatting him up though, TJ turned out to be an IT guy with a local company who likes decorating his Converse high tops and LOVES watching the Twins.

He even shared his tequila with Joan.

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Elkhart, IN: The RV Capital of the world comes to the rescue!

Our water tank had been “leaking just a little”, but the water really started flowing as we were about to leave Doug & Kelly’s place in Culver, IN. It had been a last minute decision to head south to Indiana, but that turned out to be the best thing we could have done. 20 minutes away is Elkhart, Indiana – the “RV CAPITAL OF THE WORLD”. There are several RV manufacturing facilities there and (most importantly), a score of RV repair shops! Paul’s RV service happily squeezed us in on a Monday morning. For a while there all the innards of the van were out in the gravel driveway and Joan couldn’t bear to watch her baby get torn apart. However, Nick found the problem, fixed it, and got us out of there in under 2 hours! Good as New!

It turns out that we broke down in the perfect place.

If we’d headed instead for “camping heaven” in the upper peninsula of Michigan, we could have been stuck without water in the middle of nowhere.

So, we celebrated by going to the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart. Yes, that's a real thing and it was a really really wonderful way to cap the day. My favorite part was that they had an exhibit on RV toilets which Joan kindly agreed to pose with.

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Naperville, IL: The grocery store reveals the character of the neighborhood

In the bay area, we like to think we live in a very diverse part of the country. Conversely, from the left coast the "midwest" seems like a giant sea of whiteness. Yet, in Naperville, IL we found the “Naperville Fresh Market”. It's hard to describe, but you can think of it as a cross between Whole Foods and the United Nations. The produce was amazing. There were bulk quantities of everything if you wanted it. And, there were at least 20 different nationalities represented – Mexican, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Greek, Thai, Moroccan, Brazilian, Chinese, Iraqi, Indian, Afghan, Polish, and many more. If you know Joan, you’ll know she was in heaven. In fact as we checked out with our lunch she absolutely gushed at the cashier, “THIS IS THE BEST STORE EVER!”

And, as she pointed out later,

"We have all these foods in the bay area, but each store only carries one type. There's a mexican grocer or a chinese grocer or whatever, but never a mix."

Come to think of it, that's also true of our neighborhoods. We don't mix much.

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Our experiences this week have all in some way been about the value of a neighborhood, be it helpfulness, hospitality, people or cuisine. Around each corner there always seems to be a little something special. We can't wait to see what happens next.