Honeymoon Roadtrip

With all the craziness of the past month surrounding my workload and our wedding reception, Val and I decided on the spur of the moment that we needed a little road trip. We love road trips. The day after our reception we threw some things in the car – a few cloths, snacks, drinks, camera gear – and hit the road. Our plan was to head west to the Mississippi River, then north along the scenic highway there. Little did we realize however that we were headed into the heart of flood territory. We had been so wrapped up in our work and reception planning that we hadn’t been paying attention to the news about all the flooding in SW Wisconsin.

When we reached the Richland Center area we just hit one “ROAD CLOSED” sign after another. State Highways, county roads, those little roads that your not sure are an actual road or someone’s driveway – all had spots washed out. We even ran into a roadblock where someone’s horses had gotten out during rains the night before. We saw about a half dozen men scrambling to herd horses back to the barn. Sadly we also heard from folks there that at least one horse may have been washed away.

At first the detours were a quaint bit of adventure, and a good exercise in map reading. However it soon became clear that we should probably change our plans. We headed back to Madison, not knowing whether we would just go home or continue on somewhere else. When we reached Middleton we decided to gas up and head north. We spent Monday night in Wausau, then spent Tuesday tramping around the area between Merrill and Eau Claire and finally headed home from there. It’s such a beautiful area up there, even when it’s grey, cloudy and rainy.

We both agreed that it was a nice mini-honeymoon. We don’t want to call it a full honeymoon though. We’ll probably need to use that as a good excuse to take nice long trip down the road!