August 26

Our second day! On the road, and today our goal was to find Wabasha, the location where some parts of Grumpy Old Men were filmed. 

Today the scenery was so much nicer! We travelled mostly in Wisconsin which appears, other than the occasional city, to me almost all farms and lush, green, rolling hills. The hills are almost high enough to be considered foothills, but to my knowledge, there aren’t any mountains around.  Yet, they are beautiful with very old-looking rock formations cropping out of or on top of them.  

I have to say that the Rest Stops in Wisconsin are better than anything we have in Canada. The buildings are large, clean, spacious, and there are always park-like grounds with picnic areas and places to walk dogs.  We had a picnic lunch at a rest stop today. We could definitely take some ideas from our American cousins. I’d far sooner stop at one of these stops than the EnRoutes in Ontario that essentially pedal fast food. 

But the weather, brilliant sunshine, and intense 35 C heat.  I’m not sure we’ve had weather that warm In Kitchener or Wiarton this year!! Still our car is air-conditioned so we won’t complain too much!

Just after lunch, following Karl’s carefully researched maps and consulting with our Rand McNally Road Atlas, we lost highway 61, our route to Wabasha.  Highway 90 and 61 were rolling along together and Highway 61 just disappeared!!  Well after pulling over and checking maps we finally decided to power up Karl’s cell phone and use GPS, sigh! It took at least 40 minutes, but we did find the darn thing again.  

The detour actually took us along the Mississippi river for at least an hour.  It seems that the Mississippi starts in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, so we were seeing the headwaters of a really large, historic river!  We were surprised at how big it was already at the point we saw it.  Likely shallow and lots of marshy areas but still very wide!!

We did find Wabasha at last.  We stopped at a large sign to take pictures.  A sweet lady named Denise offered to photograph, so we both got to be in them.  Got to say the town is small, but it looks like a typical mid-western town with comfy-looking wood frame houses.  Nothing looked familiar from the movie so we headed for St. Paul’s where, we had read, quite a bit of the movie was actually shot.  Well didn’t we find pay dirt? Thanks to Google, we had the address of one of the houses used for filming - we think it was the house Ann Margaret lived in in the movie, as well as finding the houses that the two grumpy old men lived in (Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau). We took pictures so that we can watch the movie again (lol, for the 10th time) and figure it out. It was definitely the right street!!

Tired, but happy, we left St. Paul and hunted down a motel for the night.  Not too picky this time because we were/are tired… long day. 

We found a motel, the Country Inn - very nice.  We no sooner checked in than an intense thunder storm started!! High wind and the lightening that was super close.  I’m sure I saw hail although Karl says he didn’t ( he needs new glasses,)

Hungrier than tired, we waited until the rain settled and found a nice sports bar across the parking lot.  It was interesting that the folks in the next booth - about our age - started chatting with us.  Turns out that they are also big fans of Grumpy Old Men and although they live in the area have made the same trek often.  Small world!