The only thing NOT slow was the flight!

Pleasant Prairie, WI - Sat, 8 Jun 2024, 9:30am

We got in to Wisconsin late last night. Late, as in it almost wasn't Friday night anymore; it was nearly Saturday morning. Our flight to Chicago was on time. Thankfully. And surprisingly. But everything else seemed to be running behind.

We just missed the shuttle bus to the rental car facility. We had to wait for the next one.

Once the next bus came, the "4 minute" ride to the depot took more like 15.

At the rental car station, I had to wait in line to talk to a person, for no apparent reason, instead of my preferred membership allowing me to bypass the counter and go directly to a car. I think the issue was they were almost out of cars.

Dinner was late. We knew that was unavoidable with the schedule. We picked a Sonic Drive-In in Cicero. We were eating fast food on a metal picnic table in a parking lot at 9:30~10pm.

Traffic getting around Chicago was slow. There were jams near the city— yes, people still going to Chicago at 10pm— plus construction.

We arrived at the hotel around 11:40pm. At least check-in wasn't slow... though it wasn't exactly fast either. And then neither of us could get to sleep right away. I was up until about 2am. This morning I swatted snooze on my 8am alarm until almost 9.

Well, it's time to get going. We didn't travel all the way to Wisconsin to relax and sleep in; we're here to visit family!

Pleasant Prairie - EaRtHqUaKe?!

Today we're in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. We arrived late last night. This morning we slept in a bit then around 10 drove over to visit with my sister at her house a few miles away.



It was just me, Hawk and my sister B. for a while at the house. B.'s daughter was going to a friend's party in a town park, and her husband was dropping her off.

B. gave us a quick tour of their home. They've lived there for several years, though it's our first time visiting.

It's an old home, over 100 years old. It was one of the first two houses in town, she explained. The one next door was originally the general store, and this house was built by the station master for the train station when the railroad came through. The home is small but has been added onto a few times over its history. That much is obvious from the front room, where the floor is sunken because there's no foundation beneath it— "They enclosed the front porch," I suggested— plus the whole second floor seems added on as the stairway is steep and crooked. Oh, and speaking of crooked, there pretty much isn't a plumb line anywhere in the house. Every window frame is crooked. Many of the doors don't close. Some of the walls are visibly leaning. None of the floors are level. And I don't just mean slightly off level; you can see where the floors dip and rise by inches across the width of a room!

While hanging out at the house we felt a sudden shake in the floor accompanied by a loud "THUNK!" sound.

"Whoa, was that an earthquake?" I asked. "In Wisconsin??"

"I think something exploded!" my sister responded. "We need to leave the house!"

"No, it's not an explosion," I assured her. "With an explosion there'd be more sounds and smoke and fire." (Yes, I know, I'm so reassuring. 🤣)

"I felt the floor under me drop one or two inches," Hawk noted.

The three of us agreed whatever it was, it came from underneath the house. "My guess is a support beam cracked," I suggested. We agreed to go down to the basement to check.

"I'm still scared of an explosion," B. said as we peered into the darkness down the steep stairs that looked like a set from the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz.

"If something exploded down there, we'd see light from the fire and smoke coming out," I helpfully reassured her again.

Downstairs I found something similar to what I had guessed 30 seconds earlier. A metal support jack that was supporting a floor joist had rusted out and fallen over. The loss of the support created the sudden drop in the floor we felt. The "THUNK!" sound was a combination of the wood beams settling and the 6' tall steel jack hitting the concrete floor.

B. is fortunate that she and her family are renting— so it's not their problem to fix, it's the landlord's. Furthermore, they're lucky the landlord lives next door— and is an engineer. She called him on her cell phone. He came over a minute later, walking through the hedge in the back yard. And once he saw the busted support jack he was like, "Yeah, I've got a spare." I figured his house needs them, too. He probably bought a three-pack last time he needed one. 😅