This past week has been tremendously busy with teaching and other work and an exciting trip to the Midwest (Minnesota and Wisconsin). After class last Wednesday, I dashed home, grabbed my bags and jumped the lightrail to the airport to head to Minneapolis. My dear friend from college, Laura, lives in Minneapolis and I combined a research trip with a visit with her. I arrived late Wednesday night, rented a car with only minor hiccups in the process, and finally arrived at Laura’s around midnight. We stayed up late talking and then got up early the next day to go to the U of M, where Laura is doing a joint Law/PhD in Geography program. I tagged along with Laura through her school day and then we spent the evening together in Minneapolis, eating some amazing Japanese food (veggie tempura, shiitake soba soup, and some delicious tofu appetizer). I’ve been to Minneapolis before to visit and I’m always struck by how nice a city it is. It had been two or three years since I had seen Laura and it was wonderful to reconnect, particularly since we’re now both in Geography and have that awesome discipline in common!
On Friday morning, I woke up at the crack of dawn and drove to Madison, Wisconsin for the research component of my trip—the World Dairy Expo! The Word Dairy Expo is huge, with vendors and exhibitors from all over the country and the world showing off their latest dairy technologies. From the latest high-tech milking machines to iPhone apps that test the somatic cell count in milk; from semen suppliers to calf hutch suppliers; from designs for industrial dairy barns to the latest in ear tag identification systems…The World Dairy Expo had it all. I spent a long afternoon there on Friday getting increasingly weighted down by bags of pamphlets and handouts advertising and explaining the various products available. I haven’t had a chance to look at them closely yet, but I know that there are some real gems in there. I tried not to think too much about what I was seeing or hearing—I just tried to absorb as much as I could and collect materials to look at later. Since I had a limited amount of time at the expo and so much ground to cover, I did my best to keep any emotional or intellectual reactions out of the process for now.
I stayed in a motel outside of Madison on Friday night and started driving back to Minneapolis on Saturday morning. I took one exciting detour that took me off the beaten path and up along the river (the Mississippi, I think) through the hills of changing leaves and the corn fields. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to hear what the exciting detour was—it deserves its own post! There’s something really nice about being out on the road, listening to music (or an audio recording of Eating Animals, if that’s more your thing!) and watching the landscape. The way that fall comes in the Northeast and the Midwest is more dramatic than it is here in Seattle. With so many evergreen trees in Seattle, there is green all year round (which I love!), but there is not as dramatic a shift to fall. Certain streets in the city are lined with deciduous trees that change colors, but in the Northeast and Midwest, the overwhelming majority of trees change colors and it is breathtaking at this time of year.
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