Madison

From Minneapolis, we had a long 4.5 hour drive to Madison, Wisconsin. The only nice thing about Camille not feeling well was that she slept for most of the long drive.

We made a pit stop at a cute harbor town with a West Marine. Camille and I watched the boats while Nick visited the store. 

Around lunchtime, I did a quick search for "places to eat in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin" and came up with the Norske Nook. They had over 30 handmade pies - the banana creme was to die for and I don't even like pie! Besides pie, they were "famous" for their lefse, Norwegian flat bread. For lunch I had the salmon lefse wrap with tarter sauce. Interesting, but good. 

We arrived in Madison in time for dinner and went to the downtown area near the capitol building. Madison is your typical college town with most of the houses in the downtown area being rentals for college students. We had dinner at a brew pub, The Great Dane pub. We both agreed it was one of the restaurants we could go back to 10 times and still find something new we wanted to order. 

They had a free zoo in Madison, so the next day while Nick was doing his work thing, Camille and I checked out the zoo. Whenever we go to the zoo in Seattle, I sometimes get bummed that you can walk around the whole zoo and not see all that many animals since they have recreated their habitats so well and the animals have such large spaces to roam in. The Madison zoo is the complete opposite of that. The cages are so small all the animals are right there for you to see, which is cool to see them, but I felt pretty bad for the animals that have to live like that. 

The lion pacing about 5 feet from us... you could hear him roar from the other side of the zoo

 The tiger, again about 5 feet from us

Rhino

Polar bear

 Giant turtle

Riding the train

On our way out of Wisconsin, we stopped off at the Mars Cheese Castle (my friend Meagan recommended it). All over WI, they have these cheese places where they sell all sorts of different cheeses. This place was basically a store and a restaurant where you could buy all sorts of different meats and cheeses (and beer!). This would have been our dream store if we weren't staying in hotels. Instead, we decided on deluxe grilled cheese sandwiches (gouda with caraway for me - and lots of mustard!). 

They even had cheese in many shapes, including a cow. Teehee.