When we woke up this morning we made some oatmeal and hot chocolate in the microwave of our room at the hotel/warm showers hosts. After we were all packed up, and had played for a few minutes with Buttons (the kitty), we were ready to hit the road. It was a little chillier this morning than it has been, but was still very comfortable riding weather. Our once very flat ride through Illinois has gradually become hillier during yesterday and today. We had a little bit of a head wind today as we were heading north towards the Wisconsin border. After riding for only about 20 miles, we decided to stop for lunch. We sat at the picnic tables outside of Subway and made some Spaghettio's to split. After lunch we rode for about 10 miles before deciding to stop at the local IGA store in Warren, the northernost town in IL, to get some OJ to split. Shortly after, when we reached the Wisconsin border, we took our IL state picture since we missed it on the way in, as well as the WI state picture. The weather was cloudy all day, except for about a half hour around the time that we crossed the border into WI, when there were blue skies and sunshine. Once we began to ride in WI we headed straight west, which helped us to go a little faster since we didn't have as much of a headwind. The hills continued to get steeper and more repetitious. Although we originally planned on going a little more north in WI, we decided to head west towards Dubuque to see the Mississippi river museum. After riding through a couple tiny towns we were within ten miles of the Mississippi River! We crossed the river into Iowa on a pretty busy road, so we didn't get to take a picture by the Iowa sign, but we will get it on the way out of the state. After riding around the city for a little bit, we decided we had better take a hotel. The Holiday Inn was sold out, but we found a cheap hotel that we throught might work. However, we soon found out that the hotel would not let us take our bikes up to our room, but they would instead be locked up in a hallway where everyone could walk by. We were almost certain that they wouldn't be there in the morning, or at least things would be missing if we left them their overnight. There was no security at all, so we decided that we would look elsewhere for a hotel. Eventually we found a really nice hotel that still had a few rooms open. The hotel staff was fantastic. They originally told us we would have to put our bikes in a locked storage place that only the desk attendents would have access to, but then one of the ladies who were in charge said that since our circumstance was a little different, they would allow us to take our bikes to the room. This was very helpful because then we didn't have to unpack our whole bikes and bring everything upstairs separately. Since yesterday, we had been wanting to go to an all you can eat buffet, so we walked to the casino that was about a half a mile away and we stuffed ourselves to the brim. Everything was delicous! We walked back to the hotel and then watched a movie on the big flat screen in the room. What a relaxing evening! Tomorrow morning we will visit the Mississippi river museum before heading out of town. We rode 73.20 miles today.