Long-distance couch passenger

Friday, October 18th.

Friday was the day to move on. We had lunch with Miriam, Dan's grandmother, and said goodbye to her and then spent a few hours arranging our stuff, as it seems we always do when we move on from one place to the next. But we got everything set up pretty well in the van, said goodbye to Dan's aunt Connie and then headed out. Before we left Madison, though, we made a few stops at thrift shops to look for a suitcase for Jens. We managed to find one, but of course couldn't limit ourselves to that so we also bought some more clothes, an old baseball mitt and a skateboard... :)

Wednesday night at Susie's house we'd met a girl named Jessie who we'd offered to give a ride out to La Crosse, WI, since we were going that direction anyway. She was up for riding on the sofa, and so we got our first long-distance couch passenger. So after our thrift-shop-stops we picked her up on the way out of town. She was going out to visit her parents in La Crosse and to be reunited with her boyfriend who was flying in from Portland, Oregon, after they hadn't seen each other in 4 months. So who were we to stand in the way of true love? :)

We didn't get going until later than expected, as always, so we lost the otherwise scenic drive to the darkness but had a pleasant ride talking to Jessie instead. She has done a fair amount of outdoor travelling out west and had valuable information about which national parks to see which helped us shape our western itinerary. At 8:30pm we arrived in La Crosse and dropped Jessie off to her waiting family and boyfriend. They all came out to meet us and we took the couch out and took a picture with all of them in their front yard. They invited us to stay for dinner but since our plan was to make it to Minneapolis that evening we had to pass that up.

We had added Minneapolis to our itinerary in order to visit Dan's cousin Mark who is a freshman at the University of Minnesota. So from Jessie's house we got back on the interstate and drove for another couple of hours and made it to Minneapolis a little after 11pm. We found Mark's dorm fairly easily and met up with him and a small group of his friends that were hanging out in his room when we got there. They all came down to see the van and the couch and all piled in the van to help us move it to a better parking spot. We then spent the rest of the night partying with them and -- since Mark's roommate spent the night somewhere else and left his bed empty -- crashed in Mark's room for the night.