I spare you the details, partly because they are foggy even to us as we've ridden through the backroads of Trempeleau County, Wisconsin. Scenic and worth a return trip, for sure, but vague in the particulars.
This is where people will still live reasonably closely to their current life style once we start to run out of oil. Milking cows, growing corn, heating with wood and mating with partners for whom high school was a pinnacle not necessarily surmounted. Where hard-looking moms change babies on pool tables while their men shoot turkeys, and Budweiser Select is the premium beer, assuming you can find something that good.
Arcadia sounds like an idyllic place, and the hills are alive, but as the kids in the coffee shop in Whitehall said, it's nothing but bars. And not very good ones, at that. The Detox Center had more items on the menu than places to sit, and all but four of them were taken early Sunday afternoon by people craning their necks and not turning their stares away any time soon. Mix the patrons in with a line up for suspected meth dealers and ATV snatchers, and everyone would walk for lack of a firm identification.
I'm not trying to start class warfare here. I'm just saying we weren't welcome and the feeling came to be mutual.
We sat at a picnic table with a couple of motorcyclists outside the Kwik Stop and had a most pleasant supper. When that's the best your town can offer strangers passing through, though, it's time to consider city step fathers to replace the ones in power.
And riding all day, we saw Obama signs in town, on cars and in the coulees, with nary one for McCain,
