It doesn't feel like Day 1. It feels like we've been moving for at least a month. But Tuesday we got packed, Wednesday "Number 1 Dave" came and got most of our stuff. Thursday I passed my kidney stone into my bladder and felt well enough to go to work and clean out all my stuff in the office, and today Friday we cleaned out the house, packed the car (I am definitely the son of a Weights and Balance Officer, my dad would be proud of my terrific packing job), and headed out of town about noon. I dropped off the old Comcast hardware and drove Red Rocket to the Park and Shuttle at ABQ airport where I met up with Mar and the girls, and we parked him in long term parking. Mar made turkey rollups, and we hit the highway. After a fun long family conversation we put on "The Nanny Diaries" and made it through four CDs so far into Texas on I-40. We've had a tail wind blowing our "sail" (the Kangaroo Pouch on top of Camp, our Honda CRV we are taking East) so we got good gas mileage.
We had dinner in Amarillo at a fast food pasta place (not bad), and JUST drove into the back end of a cold front in Shamrock TX as the sun went down. No hail, but we got a little wet checking into the Best Western. First real rain for us in months. I bet we'll seen a lot of precipitation this year. Nice hot hot tub and very warm indoor pool, and wireless internet for us to write to you all.
We'll sleep pretty much 'till we wake up, have the free continental breakfast, repack the car from the mess we made running in from the rain, and head for St. Louis and, if we make it in time, the Memorial Arch. (My one piece of Lewis&Clark-ania on this trip -- if I had my druthers we'd be headed for North Dakota right now!)
We'll try to write when we find free internet. Hooray for the BabyMac! Love you all, wish us safe travels!
---Cris
Today was a long day. Mar and I were up a little after 7:30, and we worked out in the little exercise room at the Best Western in Shamrock (no power to the recumbent bike, squeaky elliptical trainer, but we got a work out). But by the time we showered, got the girls up, did a little breakfast, packed, it was 9:30 before we were on the road.
And St. Louis was a long way away.
We finished Julia Roberts reading "The Nanny Diaries" (Mar and I both obsessed all night about the stupid people in the story, but it was a good story) and after an hour of two of calling people while we were near OK City we did "All-American Girl", a long time favorite of ours about a girl who lives in D.C. and accidently saves the President from an assasination and learns about love from the President's son. Very well read by a single reader with at least 12 very distinct voices for the different characters.
But the drive was long and boring and our backs and rear ends are getting tired. We did manage to mostly skirt the front we were following (only 30 minutes of hard rain, and no tornados as we drove up Tornado Alley). We found a Comfort Inn near 6 Flags just short of St. Louis about 9, but it took quite a while to get all our stuff in from the car. Everyone else swam a bit while I wrote this, and now we will try to sleep and get an earlier start. Unfortunately, still a couple more long days of driving to get to Rochester.
The most fun was that we did find Amy Lalime (the e-mail last week to her sister's restaurant in Berkeley found its way to her) and she has been in Korea for a year and is back in the states for her summer vacation only "35 minutes" from Augusta in Maine! So the girls will head to see her after they drop me off on Tuesday, and I hope they will have a great week in Maine to make up for the long drive. And Marilyn got a room in NYC for Tuesday night the 27th and they'll do Carnegie Deli and TKTS and that will be fun too.
---Cris
For many of you, you heard about much of our day from Sean. We are somewhere in NE Ohio, in the Akron - Cleveland area (past Akron, past the Cuyahoga, but still getting the Akron paper in the machines and not the Plain Dealer). We had a really nice "Father's Day" dinner at a Macaroni Grill in Columbus. I love my family. We all talk to each other at dinner and tell stories! We are gaining weight (can you believe we are schlepping a scale from car to room every night so it can insult us in the morning? Is this any way to travel?!?! What a wife) but still only eating our hoard in the car and not paying money at convenience store gas stations as we drive along as Marilyn planned. Not a single Starbucks so far, even the drive-thru 24-hour variety that now advertise off the interstate. We do have bottled Frappachino's in the car, of course, and the rest of it is quite a hoard, too. Lunch today was a stroll around a huge Kroger's in Terre Haute ("tree hut" is how Elizebeth wanted to pronounce it, which might be a good name for an old Indian settlement), a big air- conditioned supermarket where we could swing our arms and dance and do battle summer sausage vs baugette while we made our lunch. Stretching for that time was much better than sitting in a restaurant, and the lemon pepper turkey sandwiches Marilyn made out of it was really good too.
(Speaking of food, which as our friend Cynthia always points out we mostly do in these letters, I read a great column in TIME this week. From the author of "The Omnivore's Dilema" it had suggestions on how to eat healthy. My favorites were:
We had fun figuring out E's GoGurt failed all these tests and more.)
So, St. Louis, Terre Haute, Indianapolis, Columbus, Cleveland today. Susie pointed out that you can only tell the brown part of the country (Texas panhandle) from the green in the absence of mountains. I wonder how many modern people could tell if they were in northeast Oklahoma or southern Indiana if they were dropped off the side of a road by a woods and farm and there were no signs. As Sean said, we finished All-American Girl, did A Series of Unfortunate Events, and have started The Undomestic Goddess. We did remember to call Bill and wish him happy Father's Day, and called Natalie and talked to her and tried to return Ann's call to us. One difference between east and west: continuous cell phone coverage since Missouri. Loosing another hour into Eastern time meant it is 11, but we will sleep in, big breakfast, late picnic at Niagra Falls in about 3-4 hours of driving, and then in the late afternoon pop over to Rochester to return to "business."
---Cris
