Final Day-Seattle to West Bend

I left you all sitting on the edge of your seats--"Surprise thunderstorm?" you asked. "Did they make it out alive?" you further questioned, then reminded yourself, with relief, that they must have, because they are writing this.

It was just a gentle rainfall when it woke us up. We started to pull out the tarp to throw over the tent, then checked the watch and saw it was 6:15am, only fifteen minutes until we planned to wake up, anyway, so we just decided to pack up. We hurried as much as we could, but the rain just kept falling harder and harder and the lightning and thunder came closer and closer together. We had nearly everything put together when it really started to dump and we made a run for it. The parking lot was already covered in a light layer of water, so what the rain didn't wet, the splashes did.

We got as far as the pumps and stopped to catch our breath and put our stuff together the rest of the way. Then we went inside and I changed into my only other dry leg coverings, my shorts. Last time we took a big hitchhiking trip, my second pair of pants were nondescript black sweat-type pants. They were comfortable to sleep in, but also fine for day wear. It was good having them for times like this, when my jeans got drenched. However, on this trip my second pair of pants were just pajama bottoms, not something I feel comfortable hitchhiking in. Lesson learned for the next big trip.

We ate breakfast at the truck-stop diner (have I ever told you all how much I love diners?), then headed out to start asking truckers for rides. None of the truckers filling up could give us rides, and we started to head out to the freeway entrance. We noted a Jefferson line bus filling up, and decided not to ask the driver. As we walked past him, though, he said "Where ya headed?" and when we said east, Milwaukee, he said he was going to Minneapolis. That sounded like it was in the right direction, so we accepted the ride. But as we drove off with him, he told us he would get to Minneapolis at 4pm because he was making stops along the way to pick up and drop off paying passengers. Also, we looked at a map and realized Minneapolis wasn't right on the I-90 route, so ultimately it seemed like it would cost us time. We told the driver our concerns and asked if he could let us out. He said it was no problem and pointed which direction we needed to go to get back to the freeway entrance.

We were really kicking ourselves at this point. We should have taken the minute to figure that stuff out while we were still at the truck stop, in a good position to get a different ride. As it was, we had to walk all the way back to the truck stop, costing us about 45 minutes. We chalked it up to our exercise for the day, though, and picked a couple pretty flowers along the way.

When we got back we asked around again, then headed out to the freeway entrance. By this time it was nearly 10am. We got a ride just a few minutes later from a kindly older gentleman. He dropped us off at 10:52am near Worthington, MN. At 11:11am (chicken feet!), John picked us up. John is a heavy equipment operator who has been working on windmills for the past six years. He travels all around MN for his work and was on his way home for the weekend. He'd gotten off early that day because the thunderstorms prevented work on the windmills. Speaking of thunderstorms, the one that woke us up in the morning was moving east, but thankfully the frequency with which we got rides kept us ahead of it the rest of the day.

John dropped us off at 12:20pm near Blue Earth, MN. We walked over to a nearby gas station to use the restroom. Earlier, just before the kindly older gentleman picked us up, we noticed a couple of recreational trailers pass us by. Then, just before John picked us up, we saw the very same two trailers get back on the freeway. Now, as we were headed to the gas station, we saw them a third time! They were also using the restrooms, and they noted that we were keeping right up with them. We tried to use the conversation opportunity to show them we are good people and that they should give us a ride east, but they declined. Too bad, because they were going all the way to Chicago.

No matter. At 12:42pm we got a ride with Abdi Gani. He was a nice guy, but inclined to try and convert us to Islam. It was interesting how similar his attempts were to Christian conversion attempts. He asked us to look at the sky, the heavens, look at our own miraculous bodies--how can we not believe in a creator when we see such evidence? It's a weak argument, and when we continued to tell him that that doesn't make us believe in God, he gave us the names of some great Muslim debaters we should check out on Youtube.

Abdi Gani dropped us off at 1:10pm by the turnoff for Albert Lea, and at 1:15pm we got a short ride from Brad. Brad wasn't going far, just to the junction of 35, where he would head south to visit his mother. He wondered if he should have dropped us off at one exit he had already passed, because then he was at his exit and it wasn't really an off and on-again spot. It was really two highways meeting each other, and the spot where we ended up standing to get our next ride was kind of scary. It was a lane to get from 35 to 90, but cars were going fast and it wasn't really an exit, so it was probably illegal for us to stand there. Thankfully, we got a ride pretty quickly.

At 1:35pm Ginny and her college-age daughter, Mandy, picked us up. They were going all the way to Wisconsin and could drop us off near Tomah. They were headed to a wedding and we joked that it was really our wedding they were coming for. Ginny did say that we reminded her of her niece and soon-to-be nephew in-law who were getting married. We talked with Ginny and Mandy about politics and agreed that capitalism is not working. Ginny told us how she writes a lot of letter to her local representatives about how important it is to focus on environmental problems and that they always kind of blow off her concerns. She thinks they're worried about losing their monetary support from big businesses, but this infuriates her because (I'm paraphrasing) the economy is meaningless in the face of a dying planet.

They dropped us off at 3:51pm along I-94 and we crossed over from the west entrance to the east one. A few people stopped who were going to get onto I-90 west, but then Curtis stopped at 4:28pm and was headed towards Madison. Curtis was a super-nice and interesting guy. He's from Alaska, but lives in Madison now with his wife and six kids because he and his wife are both getting graduate degrees there. He is studying Psychology to become a counselor and wants to open his own counseling office someday. I felt really inspired by him. He was, by his own admission, not a great student. He wanted to quit high school and get right to working, and had only recently finished his undergrad degree. But he had the guts to apply to graduate school and he got in and now he's doing it, while raising six kids. I think that's amazing.

He dropped us off at 5:30pm where 94 meets 33, and at this point we got off the freeway so we could follow a more direct route to Brendan's parents' place. Our hope was to get all the way to their door. At 5:40pm we got a ride with a ranger from Devil Lake who took us to Portage. He dropped us off at 5:50pm and we got a ride immediately with Crystal, Dotty, and Princess Sasha Fuzzybutt (the latter is a dog). Crystal and Dotty are Wiccans who were preparing for the 13th Annual Pagan Pride Days in Madison. They were really nice and Dotty offered us each a bottle of Mountain Dew Code Red as a wedding present.

Crystal and Dotty dropped us off at 6:20pm by the intersection for 73, and at 6:30pm we had a ride with Christina and her four adorable children, who were on their way back from a day at Wisconsin Dells. She dropped us off at 6:37pm in Fox Lake, and at 6:52pm we got a ride from a teenage boy named Donovan, who took us to a Kwik Trip gas station in Beaver Dam. By this time it was starting to get dark, and we were pretty tired, so we called Brendan's parents and asked them to pick us up there (about a 45 mile drive from their house). We bought a bag of sale donuts and sat down to eat and wait and they picked us up there at about 8:30pm. Turns out there are a couple of Kwik Trips in Beaver Dam, so it took them a little longer to get to us, but it gave them a chance to buy their own bag of sale donuts.

4 days, 3 nights, 17 rides (counting my sister and Brendan's parents, and not counting the bus driver), 1973 miles. This trip, like all our others, has reminded me how wonderful and generous people are. I think everyone should hitchhike, just to be reminded of that, or perhaps to experience it for the first time.