Today was a grand tour of the great state of Wisconsin. We started in the Holiday Inn in Rice Lake and ended in a farmhouse AirBNB in Muscoda.
Our original plan had been to tour a cheese factory, because this is Wisconsin and cheese is what they do. Well, as it turns out, the cheese factory we were planning to tour isn't open on Sundays. And today is Sunday. So... Plan A was out. We did some looking around online and found an amish place that was a few hours away and their hours were 10am-2pm on Sundays. Seems unusual for the amish, but hey, it should work out great!
We woke up early because we wanted to make sure we made it there before 2. Really, we were aiming for about 1pm to make sure we had time to tour their facility. We got up, had breakfast, and started loading the car. I'm definitely getting tired of loading the roof bag and strapping it down every single day...
We first ran past Comstock Creamery in Comstock, WI. It was only like 3 miles out of our way and essentially a storefront for a local creamery. We got there about 20 minutes after they opened and sampled a few different kinds of cheeses. They had ranch flavored cheese and rosemary something-or-other, and cranberry whatchamacallits and even pizza cheese curds. It was all quite exciting. We bought a small cheese and pepperoni sampler bag, some pizza cheese curds, and a rosemary cheddar before loading up the car and heading toward amish country.
We were on target to arrive at the amish creamery about 12:50 and around 12pm we passed a roadside sign that said the right lane was blocked 6 miles up the road. No worries, we should be fine. About 3 minutes later, LONG before the 6 miles were up, we reached a very long line of barely crawling traffic. We spent what felt like forever slowly inching forward and watching our ETA slowly tick higher and higher. As we finally passed the semi blocking the right lane, our estimated time of arrival peaked at 1:28pm. Still enough time to do a tour if we hurried.
We kept cruising through tiny town after tiny town. There were several unincorporated towns, but the smallest one we saw that listed a population was Melvina at 93 people. That hardly even seems worth having a sign for, but it was interesting to see. We drove past their one restaurant that was advertising Frog Days, whatever that is, and continued on to Cashton.
Cashton was WAY bigger than Melvina, at just over 1100 people, and it was home to the amish creamery. We traveled down the curving county road (did you know Wisconsin county roads are all named with letters?) dodging piles of horse poop on the road and passing a horse-drawn buggy heading the opposite direction. We finally approached the creamery to see a large wooden sign proclaiming their hours of operation as being Monday through Saturday ONLY. We were pretty bummed that we missed the tour and that someone on the internet lied to us about their hours. Everyone knows you should be able to trust everything you read on the internet!
We backtracked about 20 minutes to the city of Sparta for lunch at the aptly named Sparta Family Restaurant and it was quite tasty with large portions. The cheeseburger kids meal was a 1/3 lb cheeseburger with a heaping pile of fries. Their cheese curds were lightly breaded and fried to perfection and they melted in your mouth. So good.
We had no more stops after our amish defeat, so we headed to our AirBNB in Muscoda, WI. It's a decent sized 2-story house with a big backyard, which is itself in the backyard of the owner's house. Kinda weird, but still feels pretty private, and there's plenty of room for the kids to run around. There's also a vineyard directly next to us, but I'm not sure if the owners are affiliated or not. And best of all, we have access to a washer and dryer for clean laundry, without needing to make everyone hang out at a laundromat for a few hours.
Tomorrow, we head off to Ohio Iowa (I suck at this)! See you there!