Day 42: Lazy in La Crosse

Day 42:  Thursday July 17th, 2014.

La Crosse, WI.  0 miles.

With no threat of rain in the forecast overnight, I didn't put the rain fly on my tent, which gave me a spectacular view of the night stars. What seemingly should be a complete shock when you look up into the sky and you can't see the stars due to city light pollution, it was the opposite. I, like most, had been desensitized to the incredible beauty that exists all the time above my head, but now so rarely visible from planet Earth. I was completely star-struck by how intensely bright the Milky Way stretched across the sky.  As is, I wasn't getting a full panoramic view down to the horizon, the trees acting like partially-drawn curtains in front of a stage. By no means was I in a good viewing location of the night sky.  But, what I could see was brilliant, like the most incredible fireworks display you've ever seen, on all the time. 

The sounds in the morning as I awoke were surreal. The river, so gently flowing by, wasn't making a sound. But, the fish with their slurping and breaching occasionally reminded me that the river was there.  A pair of robins hopped around in the grass searching for bugs.  Two squirrels played hide-and-seek around the trunk of a tree. Just then, a small bright-yellow bird landed on the screen of my tent about 4 inches from my nose, singing a song for a few seconds before flying off, as if telling me that it was a beautiful day not to be wasted by sleeping in. 

Taking a day off in La Crosse, I hopped on my unloaded bike and flew into town in search of breakfast and a good cup of coffee.  With the camp situated on an island, I had one more bridge to cross, over a wider section of the Mississippi, before reaching the town proper. The view from the bridge was spectacular.

At the end of the bridge, a set of large bins welcomed me to the town with a message, "La Crosse - On the Mississippi River - Wisconsin's West Coast".

The town itself, with lots of charm, had many old brick buildings, some dating back to the mid-1800's.

I headed over to Grounded Coffee for a caffeine fix.  The place had tall ceilings and big windows in the front looking out onto a street bounded by brick.  The coffee was great.

Even better than the coffee here was the great assortment of breakfast options.  I ordered a yogurt granola bowl that was good, accompanied by a large not-so-typical smoothie - "Butternut Squash Mango + Veggies".  Sounds wierd.  I actually was trying to find something else when the friendly cashier told me that despite the odd-sounding ingredients, it was in her opinion the best option on the menu.  So, I took a leap.  It was outstanding.

I grounded myself at Grounded, determined to get caught up on some writing before permitting a departure from this cozy hangout.  Struggling with the slow pecking of virtual keys on a glass keyboard (all of my writing up to this point, and all of the website editing as well, has been accomplished on an iPhone), all while battling the "auto-correct" that seems to have a neo-grammatical mind of it's own, sometimes switching words up so that the sentence doesn't make sense without me catching it, I stopped and thought there must be an easier way.

Then, I remembered that my Brother-In-Law, Todd, had a nifty collapsable bluetooth keyboard that he would use to wirelessly connect to his device to enable a less frustrating form of word assemblage using a real keyboard.  I looked up at the primitive scene in one of the photographs on the wall, an elderly Ecuadorian woman, her skin heavily wrinkled and leathery from decades in the sun, wearing colorful clothes, her back hunched over, loaded with a massive bundle of textiles that she was carrying to the daily market in the hopes of selling something, the weight of this burden on her back expressed in her eyes and the rest of her face, and I thought, "What the hell am I doing?"  I grabbed my things and walked out the door in search of an electronics store to buy a portable keyboard.

The closest store I could find was about 5 miles Northeast of town in a newer area of big-box stores.  En route, I traversed a bridge over train tracks.  Underneath me, a train composed of as many as 100 oil tanker cars sat idle, probably waiting for clearance on the track.  Able to see the end of the tanker closest to me, I could read that it's crude oil capacity is 31,710 U.S. gallons.

To try and put that into perspective, the contents of just 10 of these tankers would almost flood an entire football field to 1-foot deep.  You've probably purchased a 2-liter bottle of soda pop at some point in your lifetime.  You could fit the contents of 60,017.5 of those 2-liter soda pop bottles in one of these tankers.

The current price of a barrel of crude oil is around $105.  Each barrel contains 42 U.S. gallons.  Thus, a loaded tanker is carrying 755 barrels of crude oil, or $79,275 dollars worth of crude.  A train with around 100 of these cars is moving close to $8 million dollars of crude.  Wow!

Ok, so by now you might be wondering how many of these $8 million dollar trains are moving through the area per day/week/month.  My cousin, Claudia, just happened to send me an article out of the Minneapolis Star Tribune on that very topic, and the attempt by the industry to keep such data top-secret, until now.  According to the article, there are around 50 trains per week moving through the Minneapolis area, each carrying over 1 million gallons of crude.  If we assume the low end of 1 million gallons, that's $125 million per week moving through Minneapolis.  If more of those trains are 100 or more cars, then the dolllar amount is more like $400 million per week. The stakes are high.

Continuing on, I found the keyboard I needed at an electronics store and turned around, heading back to downtown La Crosse.  On the way, I stopped at the historic Hixon House, circa 1858, now a historical museum.  Much of the original contents of the house had been moved into storage in the basement where it sat for over 70 years before it was placed back in the house once the historical society bought it.

The house is incredibly decorated with an impressive collection of antiques that had been a part of the home decor during the 19th century.

On to a Co-Op called "People's Market" to grab an assortment of delicious stuff that would be my tent-side dinner for the evening.  While in the store, I notice magnets for sale that caught my eye.  Least surprising, the pride that folks have for their cheese curds and other lactose-loaded dairy delights, living in the "dairy state".  More surprising, the folks around here are apparently aware of their topographic uniqueness and the underlying reason for it, with magnets (and t-shirts elsewhere) reading "driftless".

Loaded up with groceries, I headed back over the bridge just in time to see a massive barge being "pumped" of it's contents.  From the bridge, it looked like sand, but I couldn't tell for sure.

At the campground, I had a fantastic dinner alongside the river with seeded soda bread, salads, local cheeses and more.

Spending many Summers in Lake Geneva Wisconsin with my family, I was intrigued to find a beer brewed in the small resort town at the local Co-Op.  It was a great addition to the meal.

The sun set over the Mississippi casting brilliant colors on the glassy water surface.  It was a great ending to a restful day.