Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 10 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Today was our longest driving day, just over 800 miles from Mammoth Cave, KY to Bloomington, MN (about 14 hours in the car). We got up early with the other family in our cabin, packed up, checked out, loaded the car, said our goodbyes, and hit the road.

Around lunchtime we made a quick stop in Frankfort, IN to see my wife’s grandmother and then it was back onto I-65 North. We saw some pretty cool windfarms on the way … there must have been hundreds of them!

Our next stop was for dinner with my sister in the northern Chicago area. We took the long way around the city (I-80 to I-294) to avoid rush-hour traffic and it turned out to be a good decision. We didn’t see any major traffic until just outside of Schaumburg.

After a relative healthy dinner at Sweet Tomatoes, it was back on the road … again. Up through Wisconsin with only a brief stop in Madison for Starbucks and some supplies from Target. One rhetorical question here: what is it with hotels and indoor water parks up there? It seemed like every hotel was advertising not just a pool, but an entire indoor water park. I mean, I know it’s cold up there in the winter, but some of these enclosed slides actually went outside of the building.

We encountered some light rain after dark up up around Eau Claire and by the time we crossed the Mississippi River into Minnesota shortly before midnight, my wife and daughter had been asleep for some time. I finally pulled into our hotel in Bloomington around 12:30am and got the family into our room for the night. Whew, that was a long one! At least we don’t have to drive tomorrow, it’s shopping time!

GPS statistics after Day 3: