Greetings everyone!  This month saw the rare appearance of the back to back posts of a series with the Halloween decorations (link here).  Generally I try and avoid that in order to give adequate variety for my millions of readers (I am obligated to say that to keep from having to hear how many Peeps Linda has on that crappy Fadbook site of hers).  The reason for this is October’s posts were all done from the road. This has limited my post coverage to whatever I managed to bring along with me and could get done before shutting the lights out in the hotel room.   Today I am actually writing from the car with our trusty Verizon stick.  The light is too harsh to really post process pictures so instead I’m going to double up my series posts again with the second part of the North journey Phoadtography set.  For the curious, I’ve scheduled this release to coincide with when we expect to be back home – I didn’t want to advertise that our home was vacant so kept that out of my posts up to now.  So here we go with a post from the road about being on the road which can be viewed while you are on the road.

Let’s start with congratulations to Milwaukee for a a great baseball season!  All those predictions and high expectations we were subjected to by local radio and TV announcers made me think for a moment my Cardinals never had a chance.  Their pitching was better than my Cardinals, their hitting was better than my Cardinals and their fielding well that might have been better than my Cardinals as well.  But all that doesn’t matter to a Cardinal fan now does it? .. and why is that?  … cause my Cardinals are still playing !!!!

Did I mention I was a Cardinal fan?  oh.. well then for the record I’m a Cardinal fan!  Enough gloating, there is still one more game to get through.  Now on to a staple in the Phoadtography world.  The water tower.  I have seen pumpkins, golfballs and a giant smiley face, but this is the first time for a basketball.  This town must be in a sports dry spell if it takes this much pride in something that happened back in 1952.  Whatever keeps the faith I guess.

hit the jump to see the rest of the pictures in the great trip up North series.

Ahhhh, isn’t this sweet?  “Howdy pardner, where abouts you call yer home.  Well, hello there ruralite.  I am from Loves Park and you can’t miss us.  We have a lovely heart on our water tower”

Hey, we are suppose to be heading North not East.  Give me that map again.  Harvard must be proud to have a sister city whose apparent biggest claim to fame is a “Milk Day”.  The good news is they can probably forget about any lawsuits from competitors – who wants to see Company A vs Harvard on any legal document.

To counter the cute heart shaped tower I give you robo-tower.  The US army’s newest weapon for the sand war theater.  So secret they still have to keep the undercarriage covered up.  I can envision it now.  This thing rolls up to an insurgent stronghold and unleashes a torrent of water on them.  If it doesn’t scare the crap out of them at least they will smell better.

Speaking of objects cluttering up our countrysides.  I need some facts and data here.  I spent this week watching huge semis travel down the road with pieces of these units.  That is one truck each for the three fins, another for the base and at least 4 trucks for the support sections.  The base and columns required a spotting vehicle.  Add in the inefficiency brought on by the fact they are directionally fixed limiting wind effectiveness, what is the return on investment of these eyesores.  Or are we suppose to overlook that in favor of lining green investor pockets (that is the real inconvenient truth)

Might as well go with the other Phoadtography staple .  It is difficult now to throw a stone without hitting a cow statue.  What is rare today is one that is actually painted in real cow colors.

It seems like more and more of these are popping up these days.  Surprised they haven’t fond a way to make the cross section spin in the wind.  Their god would certainly reward them with plenty of wind to thank them for their faith and the green investors would have a whole new marketing base.

I’ll take those two chairs and that beautiful table but something still seems to be missing from our perfect kitchen… I just can’t put my finger on it .. wait a minute… yes, I must also have that deer head.  It will go perfectly with the bone china.

There are two establishments out there that understand good chocolate (at least in the United States).  In my opinion, the best by far is Anderson’s in Richmond IL.  We found this place by accident while passing through there once for an agility dog show.  Ever since then, I refuse to go on a trip up North that doesn’t include  a stop there.  I highly recommend their dark chocolate covered pineapple.  DELICIOUS.  Unfortunately, we left our purchases out in the car and they melted – have no fear, they may have looked unappealing, but they tasted just as good.

The second is Trader Joe’s.  We do not have one by us, but our friend Sung will get us some chocolate from there when he is up near Chicago.  We spotted this store as we were driving up to a park north of Milwaukee.  Turned out too late to stop in on the way back – bummer.

Quick, what do you see when  you look at this?

Is it disturbed to immediately have Total Recall pop in your head or is this exactly what you were thinking?  I thought so.  How about this car dealership.  Something sounds fishy when they can back the truck up, hitch it to the dealership office and get out of town before you realize you’ve been scammed.

Surprisingly, this particular trip only had a few sightings of our babies.  I ended up snapping this horrible shot just to have a picture of one for this post.  I better be seeing a LOT more of the big yellow in Milwaukee now that Cat just acquired one of their mining companies.

and I want to see a whole lot less from this company!  Especially when these monstrosities are hogging the roads.  I say we ban all combines from the road unless they say Lexion or Claas – I may be biased here.

Then again, I may be extremely safety conscious.  Nothing like taking up three lanes on a major highway.

Now on the other hand we should give all the room this trucker needs.

Can you tell what the bottom left sticker says?  Admittedly, I made Linda slow down so I could get a good shot of it.

Just a few more months and the opponents of share the wealth and proponents of smaller government will hopefully come through.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a fall shot.  One good thing about traveling in early fall is how colorful the scenery is.  This really got our hopes up for gallery pictures on our vacation.

That’s all folks, Linda is pulling into Burger King and I don’t want to impede the feed me mode. This month is in the books, time to start looking through thousands of pictures to prepare for November.