Spring Road Trip 2025 - Part 1

Carrie: Spring Road Trip is a seasonal small conference for the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association (MIBA). A bookselling conference is pretty much as fabulous as you might be thinking. And this particular travelling conference is introvert sized and features a new small town from the association each year. 2025 took us to Mineral Point, Wisconsin. The tiny town is either the most extraordinarily idyllic place in the universe or someone there has made some horror genre level bargains to achieve quaint.

Liz: Quaint must be a new synonym for sacrificial. There were no children, which is kind of great but also kind of unsettling… we can get into that more later.  

Matthew:  I don’t actually believe that there were any cultlike activities happening (despite my best attempts to find and join them) but there really is something otherworldly about Mineral Point.  It is a small town, deeply connected to its artists and inspiringly welcoming.  It is just a hair from being too good to be true. Although, Liz has a point.  On our second day we commented to each other about how we hadn’t actually seen any children, only for an entire line of kids being led by a teacher to walk by at that exact moment.

Liz: Coincidence? I think not. 

Carrie: As VP of the MIBA Board, I had a meeting slated for the afternoon before the conference. With a six hour drive ahead, and being habitually early, I planned on picking up the crew and getting us on the road before six am on departure day. Liz and Matthew were good sports and honestly, we were pretty excited about the trip in general so it was an early, but chipper start. We managed to hit pretty much all of the required road trip requirements, including a fab CD of 90’s dance music and car games. 

Liz: We drowned so many cows. Figuratively. Not literally. And I clearly won. 

Matthew:  Liz insists this is a well known road trip game.  I’d never heard of it before and, as near as I can tell, it was a thinly veiled excuse for Liz to say that she was drowning cows. A LOT of cows. 

Liz: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. 

Matthew: It was also how we learned that Liz’s concepts of Ponds and Lakes are utterly nonsensical. Shelly from Speckled Frog popped into the shop and has also never heard of this alleged “well known” game. 

Liz: Apparently ponds are basically lakes and lakes are basically oceans… according to some people. 

Carrie: Do I need to pull this car over?

Liz: When we arrived in Mineral Point, Carrie left for her aforementioned meeting and Matthew and I started exploring the town. The downtown strip had the usual storefronts like restaurants, coffee shops, a million art galleries, you know the usual. While walking through one of the million art galleries, the gallery owner started chatting with us about why we were visiting. When they heard we were only there for a handful of days, a volunteer from the local newly refurbished opera house was listening in and offered to take us on a private tour of said opera house. 

Matthew:  I don’t want to derail the focus of this post, the awesome MIBA conference, but the Opera house was constructed in 1915 and had some amazing molding.  During the restoration process they found that the original company that did the moldings not only still existed but still had the original molds that they could use to replace damaged or missing parts.  It was kind of amazing.

Liz: Matthew was a theater kid in a previous life, therefore was very enamored with the opera house. It was a LOOOOONG conversation. 

Matthew: You’re welcome.

Carrie: So while I was in meetings, they had fun. Thankfully, I was able to meet them back at THE HOUSE, which was extraordinary, where we picked up Mary(and Jen from Fuji, our other housemate)  and met friends for dinner and kicked off the next two days of hugging and catching up.

The walk to dinner was a “gentle decline". The walk back was brutal. 

Liz: Brutal: Adjective. Meaning punishingly hard or uncomfortable. 

Matthew:  I get the feeling all of Liz’s college papers started, “The Dictionary defines…” 

Liz: And this is why I will never be a writer.