Road Trip: Midwest

Tonight we've finally made it to the Chicago area after 2 days of driving from Rapid City. Last night we stayed in Minnesota on the bluffs of the Mississippi River and I was squealing like a little girl about the bugs. God, give me a good old Washington state slug any day. They grow mosquitoes the size of mosquito hawks in Minnesota and I spent more time hiding in the tent than enjoying the views. I'm embarrassed to say that I have this weird panic thing when I comes to mosquitoes. I have seen bears and huge elk across the trail from me on backpacking trips, held tarantulas, let huge Australian stick bugs crawl all over me, but put me in a cloud of mosquitoes and I panic. Even the clouds of these ugly big moth things in Dubuque today didn't bother me. I know - weird. Anyhow, I have survived my multiple panic attacks and am ready to brave the cockroaches of Chicago tomorrow. We'll be in the area for several days so I'll try to post again before we start the trek back to Wyoming.

The picture above was taken at the Spam museum, which I joked about in a past post. We ended up stopping there and were happily surprised. The place is an amazing museum. I'm not joking! There was all of this history, fun and goofy interactive games, and much more. Even for an anti-spam person like me it was a blast. Seriously! Once you see my waymark you'll believe me.

Oddball Museums

The blog's featured waymark this week, Mutter Museum, is a museum focusing on odd medical rarities. It's waymarked in the oddball museum category and it got me thinking about a few of the odd museum's that I've happened upon while researching waymarks for our road trip. We likely will only stop at a couple of these, but here are a few that we came across: the Squirrel Cage Jail Museum (a wheel of jail cells that circles with a hand crank), the National Museum of Roller Skates, Hormel's Museum of Spam with its "World's Largest Wall of Spam" (for those of you who've never been subjected to the horror of eating or looking at Spam - it's a chopped and formed pork (supposedly) product cushioned in a gelatinous ooze and packed in a can - UGH!), and a barbed wire museum which also sports the world's largest plow, I believe. It never ceases to amaze me that any item, no matter how mundane, will be loved enough by some person to have its own museum.

In the past I used to poke fun at the people who are obsessed enough with something that they could create a whole museum to it. Of course, that was before I started a whole Website and a blog dedicated to the hobby of waymarking. I can no longer point fingers. ;)