The Midwest

I picked up a load of sausages from Hillshire Farms (now a division of Sara Lee) in New London, Wisconsin (north of Oshkosh, west of Green Bay). The day was gray and rainy and the air heavy with the scent of smoke and pork flesh. It is not easy to tell the difference, on the exterior, between a food processing plant such as this one, and a plant that produces anything else, edible or not. It is all metal siding, pipes and fans and machines and docks to back into and load up.
I took said sausages to Tolleson, Arizona (part of the hideous Phoenix metro) to a Sara lee "Mixing" facility. A place like this takes products from all the various subsidiaries of a parent company and "mix" them and ship them out to warehouses and distribution centers, a sort of warehouse for warehouses, another middle man, more truck movement.
From New London I traveled southwest on US-151 a route that cuts a beautiful diagonal across the state of Wisconsin from Manitowoc on Lake Michigan (home to Manitowoc, makers of such dissimilar products as cranes and ice machines) through the capital at Madison, across the driftless zone, a relatively rugged area untouched by glaciation in the last ice age, and crosses the Mississippi into Iowa at Dubuque.

The Wisconsin state capitol at Madison.


A road cut exposing "prairie stone" in southwest Wisconsin.


Iowa farmland outside of Dubuque.


More Iowa farmland near Brooklyn.


The (possibly most ostentatious) state capitol at Des Moines.