Iola!

I wish I could start every trip we take with a car show. But I’d like to keep my travel partner so that will remain just a wish. The Iola Wisconsin Car show had been on my radar since we started planning this year’s tour. While my resto-modding project ( click here for that story ) is on hold for now, I still needed some replacement parts for the car. Plus this show looked like fun. And as it turned out, it was.

We started out for Wisconsin mid-day Friday. Our first stop for traveling coffee was BrickHouse Coffee in Minonk, Illinois. The coffee tasted really good. The shop is in an old repurposed building with many historic pictures of the building dating back to the turn of the century. It’s just a few minutes off the interstate and worth the visit.

We headed north into Wisconsin and stopped at Bodacious Brew in Janesville, WI. This shop is on a downtown building known as Bodacious Shops on Block 42. There are numerous other business that share the building in a open floor set up. The coffee was very good and we took a walk around the patio and terrace. The building is right on the shore of the Rock River.

We went on our way to Marshfield, WI where we would spend the night before the Saturday car show. We could have stayed in Steven’s Point but the room costs were, to put it nicely, ridiculous. So we chose Marshfield. It was a little more than an hour drive to Iola from there.

On a recommendation we found an nice bar/restaraunt called NutzDeep II. We had cheese curds and a burger. Very good food for a bar. There are two versions of the origin of the name of the bar; I’m partial to the one where a guy named Wally drives his John Deere tractor through the front door of the bar with the owner exclaiming, “We’re going to be nuts deep tonight”.

The next morning we headed to the show. As expected, the traffic was heavy. The show advertised free parking but as it turned out, that lot is a half a mile away and requires a shuttle. All around the grounds there were parking areas that advertised ‘parking closest to the show’ but those were not free. We ended up paying $20.00 for parking. The entry fee was also $20.00 each-not really a surprise for a show like this. And what a show!

Now I’ve been to large car shows before. But I have never been to a show with 4000 vendors. They had almost everything there for sale, mostly car parts. Since I was looking for specific parts, we started at one end of the vendor area and began our walk. We walked and we walked. And after almost three hours, we took a break. Incidentally even though we continued visiting vendors after our break, we never made it to the end!! This is why some people spend more than 1 day at the show.

During our break, we bought some fried pies from an Amish food tent and then made our way to the grandstands for the Miss Iola Pinup Contest.

There were several guest appearances at the show, Jerry Mathers (Leave it to Beaver) and Butch Patrick (Eddie from The Munsters). But the one that had my attention was Derek from Vice Grip Garage.

The Vice Grip Garage Youtube channel has over a million and a half subscribers. Derek’s job at the 3-day show this year was to pull and replace a motor and transmission in a 1968 Firebird. He did finally finish late Saturday evening. Lines to buy his swag and to meet-n-greet circled around the grounds.

We headed out about 3:00pm towards Milwaukee. We made a double fuel stop in Oshkosh, WI for gas and coffee. We were both tired and needed a boost to get us to Milwaukee so we stopped at a brand new Scooters Coffee drive-in for the boost. I know we’ve visited and written about Scooters before and it kind of bends our rules about visiting coffee chains but we needed some caffeine and there aren’t many other shops open on a Saturday afternoon. Plus there’s no real rules, more like guidelines. The coffee tasted great and we were on our way to finish out the first full day of our tour.