On much of the drive across the country the first time, Abby sat in the front seat and talked to me while Katrina sat in the back seat and watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2. (I eventually had to ban discussions on Buffy, but that's a different story.)
One thing Abby liked to do was to see how far she could push me before I snapped. How many times could she poke me before I told her to knock it off? How long could she sing highly annoying tuneless songs before I told her to be quiet? It was a grand psychological experiment for her, and I was her prime subject.
Every experiment would end with me telling her to quit it, and then with her laughing at me and telling me what she was doing.
By the time we hit the east coast, I was a little tired of my position as Experimentee #1, so I decided to turn the tables.
We were driving down the road, and the girls made some sort of joke about how the loo was an English word for toilet. I didn't hear them the first time, but they thought it was pretty hilarious, so I asked them what they'd said. They told me, and I got the joke, but instead I said, "I don't get it."
So they explained it again.
And again I said, "I don't get it."
After a few rounds of this, Katrina was practicially beside herself at how incredibly dense her mother was. Although I think the word she was using was stupid, not dense.
It was getting harder and harder to keep a straight face throughout all of this, and it was a good thing it was dark and the girls couldn't really see me, or I would have been outed far earlier than I was.
On about the fifth or sixth time that I didn't get it, Abby started drawing me a picture to explain it all to me. At that point, there was absolutely no way I was able to keep a straight face. In fact, I was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face. I'm not sure how they believed me yet again, after the explanatory drawing was complete, when I said, "I don't get it."
They were sort of out of ideas at this point about how to make me finally get it, when I told them that I was running my own experiment to see how long they'd believe me for.
Abby said that she had been getting sort of suspicious. Katrina didn't seem to be harboring many earlier suspicions.
I guess we know which daughter has more faith in my intelligence!
The girls were especially excited to go to NYC, but I think that I ended up loving it more than anyone else, although we all really liked our visit there.
I was completely unprepared for how much I would like the city. I'd been looking forward to seeing the sights there, but what I really liked the most was just being there and soaking in the atmosphere. As a result, my NYC pictures are very few and far between, because far more than other places, I was too busy absorbing everything to think about taking pictures. (My small NYC collection is here.)
We took the train from the Metropark station in New Jersey into NYC, and got off at Penn Station. Penn Station was a little bit crazy, and I had no idea where I was going, so the first thing I did was buy a subway map, which also had some city streets on it. While I was really prepared for some aspects of the trip, other areas I had just decided to wing it, and NYC stuff was definitely in the winging it category.
We got out onto the sidewalk, but I didn't feel like I could just stop and study my map. People were moving, and we moved right along with them. After a few blocks, I found a Starbucks and we ducked inside to get a drink, but mostly so that I could study the map and get a little bit oriented.
It was at Starbucks that I had my first wow, things are different here moment. I ordered my usual double-tall nonfat latte, and the girl behind the counter, who had some sort of strong accent that fascinated me, called it as a skim latte. I'd never thought much about the usage of nonfat vs. skim, but skim is definitely the word to use on the other side of the country.
After we got our drinks and found a little table to sit at, a man who was sitting at a larger table insisted that we move to his table, and he'd take ours, because we needed more room. I declined at first, but he insisted, so we moved.
That sort of thing never happens in Seattle.
It was almost noon, and we were supposed to meet some friends in Chinatown for lunch at one, so the first order of business was to find our way to Chinatown. I'd been quite sick the day and night before, and was still feeling sort of surprised that I was actually feeling well enough to be doing things like standing up and walking around, and I had pretty much no idea where I was supposed to be in Chinatown, but figured that getting to Chinatown would be a step in the right direction.
So I studied the subway map and we found the station and in finding the station I ran into my biggest difficulty in finding my way around NYC -- I had no idea which way north was. Many times I felt like a compass would have been the best piece of equipment to help me figure out where I was going, and how silly would that look? Standing in the middle of the city peering down at a compass.
But we eventually found our way to the subway station that we wanted to find and bought all-day passes (which involved getting seven dollars in dollar coins from the guy manning the station, because I could only buy two passes with my credit card and the machine wasn't taking bills that day, only coins) and we got onto the subway and off at the right stop and then I called Rebecca who made me really happy by sounding impressed that I was actually near Chinatown and told me how to get to the place we were meeting. When we got there, she gave me a map with all the streets, which totally made my day.
We had lunch in Little Italy, outside, and I admired the buildings. On the west coast, there's so few buildings that are even fifty years old, and to see streets of buildings where they're all older than that is just too cool. I would love to have weeks to just wander through and take pictures of buildings.
After lunch we meandered back to the subway station and the girls got their names painted on cool posters and then we found our way to our hotel, which was down in the financial district. Getting there took a bit longer than I'd intended, because the train that we got on had been rerouted so it went across to Brooklyn instead of running through the financial district and making stops there, first.
Once I was off track, it took me a while and a couple of misinformed train rides to get going back the right way again. This stemmed from my second biggest difficutly finding my way around in New York -- not knowing where the Bronx was. I couldn't find it labelled anywhere on my map, and it was making me crazy because all the subway signs were wanting to take me to the Bronx. While I was pretty sure I didn't want to go TO the Bronx, I didn't know if I wanted to go towards the Bronx or not.
As it turns out, I did, but I didn't figure out where the Bronx was until a while later, when I noticed that my map did, actually, tell me where the Bronx was -- but in big light blue letters that stretched across the north side of my map, that sort of blended into the background. After I figured that out, getting around by train became a whole lot easier.
We checked into our hotel and chilled out for a little bit, then we hit the road again (this time much less encumbered by baggage) with the goal of finding dinner and the Empire State Building. We very randomly chose the place we had dinner at, it was some sort of mexican-cajun place, and dinner was pretty good, but not great, but I still wasn't terribly hungry and food was still tasting kind of weird, so who knows how good it really was.
After dinner, we wandered towards the Empire State Building and did some shopping on the way and then we waited in a very long line to first go through security, then to buy tickets, then to go through security again, then to go up the elevator, and then to go up the second elevator, and then to actually get out onto the viewing platform.
The highlight of waiting in line was that Abby was recognized as a princess. They had a guy in the ticket waiting area who was generally chattering about the audio tour that was available for rent, and as we wound our way around through the switchbacked lines, he spotted Abby, and he pointed at her and said, "Look! There's a princess among us." Abby blushed, and we moved on, until we'd switched back to where he could see us again. This time he asked her where she was from, and asked her if she was a princess. We moved on again, and the third time he said she was probably wishing he'd leave her alone.
The audio tour, which we did rent, (really, how could we not?) was really interesting. What got me especially was that it was built in 14 months. This was something that I thought about a lot on this trip -- how people accomplished so much before so many of the things that we take for granted now were invented. The building was scheduled very carefully, so that the necessary steel arrived right as it was needed, and the precision of the planning was one thing that allowed the building to be built so quickly. But there was no cool computer program to help plan the steel arrivals -- or even an old version of Excel!
After the Empire State Building, the girls hailed a cab and we went back to our hotel, where we all crashed.
On Wednesday evening, I drove into the sunset in Ohio.
On Thursday evening, I drove into the sunset in Minnesota.
On Friday evening, I drove into the sunset in Wyoming.
On Saturday, I laid in bed and watched tv, and let the sun set unobserved.
On Friday, we were finished seeing Mt. Rushmore at about six in the evening, and because we'd been driving until one or so in the morning for the previous two days, I thought about how far we'd be able to go if we drove that long again and stayed in a motel, instead of camping at Spearfish, SD, like we'd planned. (Yes, I admit that the thought of not having to drag out the still-wet tent was a bit of a motivating factor as well.)
I looked at the map and figured that trying to get to Billings, Montana was reasonable. So we got to Billings about midnight, and tried to find a motel room. The girl at the counter of the motel I stopped at said that all the motel rooms were full, and I'd have to drive 2.5 hours west to B-something I didn't quite catch in order to find a room. She also told me about all the things that were going on in town, that was causing the full hotel rooms, but I was tired and didn't care enough to try to pay attention at all.
I figured I could drive a couple more hours, and so I bought a big cup of tea and drove into the darkness for almost two hours, then I arrived in Bozeman and figured that this was the town motel girl was talking about. So I found a motel and asked if they had any rooms, and motel girl number two said that all the rooms in town were full, and I'd have to go to either Billings or Butte to find a room. She also said Butte was 2 hours away.
I already knew all the motel rooms in Billings were full, and I knew it was only 90 miles to Butte, which is not two hours, unless you're travelling by mule, and then it would be considerably more than two hours, so at that point, I lost all my faith in anything any motel girl might tell me.
And I knew I was way too tired to drive the hour-plus it would take me to get to Butte, and I was pretty sure that she didn't really know if there were any rooms available, even if I was awake enough to make it there. So I drove to the WalMart parking lot across the street, tucked my car in between two motorhomes, and slept until about 6:30 in the morning, when the sun came up, and I started feeling too weird about sleeping in a parking lot to continue to sleep.
We made it to Missoula, Montana, which was our planned stop for Saturday night, by 9am, and were home by 5:30. I only had to stop once for a 1-hour nap at a Montana State Park.
Today I am busy catching up on the news of the last three weeks, by watching all the Daily Show episodes that TiVo taped for me. I did manage to go buy groceries at about 11am this morning, and have sworn that next time I go on a long vacation, I'm going to stock up on food for two days post-vacation. I was ready for dinner at about 9 last night, but not in any mood to actually leave the house, or, really, the comfort of the bed and the tv.
I've forgotten important groceries, but am not sure I'm going to actually leave the house again. It's good to be home.
Tonight we're staying in a somewhat cozy motel in South Bend, Indiana.
Last night, we were camping near Gettysburg, and it was definitely our most exciting camping experience yet.
We capped off the day yesterday by going on a ghost tour in Gettysburg -- where a guy dressed in supposedly period clothing drags a group of about 25 people around the streets of Gettysburg and tells us all about various spooky sightings and other phenomena that supposedly happened nearby.
The tour was interesting, and there were some genuinely creepy parts. Like when we were walking, and a guy dressed like a union soldier stood leaning against the lamppost on the other side of the street, just staring at us, and didn't move until we'd all moved on. It caused a bunch of whispers of 'do you see him? is he real?' among the tour participants.
The last stop on the tour was a building where a couple had supposedly seen a scene from the 1800s, then, when they looked again, saw the current art gallery inside the window. As the tour ended, Katrina got a nosebleed, and we walked carefully past the possibly-haunted building.
We drove back to our campsite, and we saw lightening flash across the sky all the way back, but heard no thunder, so I figured we were not in any danger from nearby lightning, and we crawled into the tent to go to sleep.
The combination of the lightning and ghost stories was enough to convince Abby that something was out there. She asked me what every snap and crackle was outside the tent, and as we started to hear the occasional boom of thunder, she'd check to make sure it was indeed thunder. I could tell when she fell asleep, because she quit checking on the thunder.
An hour and a half later, there was no question that there was thunder. The lightning flashes were visible inside our closed tent, and the thunder was booming loudly together with the flashes of light. We hightailed it out of the tent and into the car, where I cracked the window to be able to hear the thunder better.
The open window lasted for about ten minutes, because then the rain started. And boy, it wasn't fooling around. It rained and rained and the lightning flashed and the thunder boomed, and Abby was lying on her back in the back seat, with her head towards one door and her feet up on the back of the seat. Katrina was curled in the corner, and she had by far the worst position of the three of us. As Abby would fall asleep, her feet would drift down the back of the seat and into Katrina.
A couple of hours later, I woke up and realized that the lightning was gone, even though the rain was still coming down like it had to get 40 days and 40 nights worth into the next twelve hours. Due to the extreme uncomfortableness of the car, we scampered back into the tent. I took a brief moment to retrive Katrina's tennis shoes, which has unfortunately been left outside. I dumped the inch of water that had collected in them and tossed them into the car.
By this morning, the rain had mostly stopped and it was time to survey the damage. The tent was a little damp on the bottom inside, but had held up pretty well, which is a good thing, because the labels on our air mattresses are very clear that they are NOT to be used as floatation devices.
A couple of weeks ago, when we were in Colorado Springs with Debbie, (which at this point seems very long ago) Abby decided that she wanted pie. So Deb and I decided that we'd make pie for dessert that night. The day was young, and we were still full of energy and ambition.
By around eight that night, we'd just finished dinner, which was pizza that we'd made, and I was pondering laundry and not pie. Abby didn't get her pie that night, but I promised her that she would soon, very soon, get to have pie.
Whether I kept my promise or not depends on your definition of soon, I suppose.
We kept making our way across the country, and while she didn't lack for dessert, she didn't manage to get any pie before we arrived in Washington DC. By this point, she was calling me 'pie-hater' with alarming regularity. I kept professing my love for pie, and reiterating my promise of pie, but that didn't stop the harassment.
When we visited the Museum of American History, we were in the snack shop downstairs, and Abby pointed excitedly. There was pie! Lots of pie!
Unfortunately, it was all fake pie, in the automat display that lined the back of the snack area.
Poor Abby.
Eventually, we got a hot tip about the place to get a giant slice of cherry pie in Washington DC, so we made our way to Kramer's, and we each had a big piece of cherry pie.
I was a pie-hater no longer.
The pie-trauma wasn't quite over, though. On the way back from NYC, late at night, we decided to swing through McDonald's for a snack pie. We'd had a late lunch and skipped dinner, and it was almost midnight, so we were all ready for a little something to tide us over.
Unfortunately for us, however, McDonald's was only serving their 'late-night' menu, which removes all the good stuff (pie) and leaves only the gross stuff (many other menu items). Abby and I both got highly annoyed and didn't want anything at all, if we couldn't have pie. Katrina was a little smarter, even as she was woken up out of a sound sleep, and got a sprite and a supersized fries. Of course, Abby and I then stole a whole bunch of her fries, because it was midnight, and we hadn't eaten in a long time.
Poor Katrina. Good thing she supersized.
Next batch of pictures is up, here.
Disk drive was unfortunately left in Colorado, but a new one has been obtained and now we are back in business!
More updates coming soon, I promise!
We have been in the DC area since Friday evening. We made way better time from Louisville than I thought we would, so we went into downtown DC to grab something to eat and look at a couple of things before we made our way to Margaret's.
Things I learned on our first walk through DC:
Unfortunately, the girls were just wearing their flip flops, so weren't terribly equipped for walking far. We did, eventually, find a sub shop, where we all tore into our food like wild animals. The girls wanted to take a taxi back to the car, and I told them that if they found one and hailed it, we could take it. So they did, and we did, and they were very excited, as they'd never ridden in a taxi before.
In all the excitement of getting into DC, (and we were all so excited when we saw the Washington Monument for the first time!) I'd sort of forgotten about mundane things like getting gas, but we managed to coast out to Margaret's on what gas we had left.
Then the girls got to meet their cousins, Nicole and Alexa. They're all pretty close in age, and they have been having a great time. Alexa and Katrina watched a movie, and Abby and Nicole got involved in an art project. We all stayed up way too late! The girls have all been having big slumber parties in the living room, which doesn't help them go to sleep any sooner, but they are having so much fun together.
The next morning, (where by morning I mean shortly before noon) we took the metro downtown to DC, and went to the Natural History museum. We were planning on also seeing the American History museum, but even in three and a half hours, we didn't see everything in the Natural History museum.
After that, we came back to Margaret's, and then we all went up to Harper's Ferry, to go on the myths and legends of Harper's Ferry tour. The kids all adored the ghost stories, and I was completely captivated by all of the old brick buildings. I think I could spend three days just there, wandering around and taking pictures.
We are planning on going to the fireworks display downtown today, but it was thunderstorming earlier, so we're not sure if it will still be on for the day or not. If it's just raining, though, we will definitely go!
We're in Eastern time now! That means we're almost all the way across the country. It seems sort of hard to believe that we've come this far. Starting a couple of days ago we were really far enough away from home that our license plate is noticable.
This morning we started off in Columbia, Missouri, and left shortly before 7am. Katrina thinks this is cruel and unusual, but I couldn't be persuaded otherwise. I even did all the hard work -- I packed up their stuff, I loaded the car. All they had to do is get up and get in the car. Abby slept for the first couple of hours, but Katrina never went back to sleep all day long.
I was getting so sleepy when I was driving today. I went to sleep after midnight and got up around six, so it wasn't exactly a sleep-filled night. I was planning on getting some coffee at the first Starbucks or Starbucks-like place that I saw, but I didn't see any for a very long time. We stopped slightly east of St. Louis for breakfast at a McDonald's, and I asked pathetically if there was a Starbucks nearby. The nice McDonald's guy actually went and got the phone book and looked it up for me to see if there was one anywhere, but the only one was 25 miles away in a direction I wasn't going.
So we continued on. I called my mom to see if she would look up any nearby Starbucks for me, and she and my father laughed at me, but didn't find any nearby. Although she did discover there were 350+ Starbucks in Illinois, there were none in my part of Illinois. The Land of Lincoln is not the Land of Coffee, much to my dismay.
Abby was very awake at that point, and promised to whack me with her stuffed bear if I fell asleep, but I didn't think that was really a sufficient way to be sure I would stay awake, so I got really desperate and sleepy, and went through a McDonald's drive-through to get some coffee there. I can't even remember the last time I tried to drink a cup of regular coffee, and I asked for tons of cream and sugar, but didn't get nearly enough to mask the nasty, watery taste of the coffee. Eventually I did drink it all, and then I felt a ton better. I am really happy that I know there's a Starbucks between here and the freeway. I will be all set tomorrow!
We arrived in Louisville at Emilie's house by 3, and then hit the town to see a few things in Louisville. We started off at the Kentucky Derby museum, which was really interesting. The best part was the movie that they showed about the race, which was shown on a whole circle of screens around the room, and was very nicely done. After that, we went out to the racetrack where a race was about to start.
I placed a bet, just to say I did it. Abby told me to bet on 5, but I bet on 3, rather frantically, as the race was about to start and while they had rules posted telling you how to place your bet, I was so clueless that I didn't understand what exactly the rules meant. Of course, 5 was the one that won, and I got a big I told you so from Abby. Especially as 5 was the long shot and the payoff would have been pretty good.
After that, we found dinner and then went on a cruise down the Ohio River on a paddleboat. It was pretty hot and muggy today, but the top deck of the boat was breezy and nice. They had a DJ, who was a friend of Emilie's, on the lower deck, with a dance floor and the girls hung out with them for much of the cruise and had a great time.
Now everyone is slowly getting showers and thinking about going to bed, but I don't actually see anyone doing anything like going to sleep yet. Tomorrow we'll make another early start, and will be in Washington DC by bedtime. Then, a week and a half of very little driving! I don't mind the driving so much, as long as I'm properly caffeinated, but it will be nice to be able to devote whole days to sightseeing, and to not have to jam everything in the trunk in my own real-life version of Tetris every day.
I'm looking at the computer clock, which is still on pacific time, and it says it's only 10pm, but I'm very tired!
Today we woke up at Mary's house in Topeka, and the girls swam for a bit, then we packed up and had a late breakfast, then took off for Independence, Missouri.
In Independence, we went to the trail museum, where I learned that Independence wasn't just the jumping off point for the Oregon trail, but also for the Santa Fe trail and the trail to the California gold rush. The museum was laid out in a neat way, with different paths leading down the different trails, at the same sort of junction points that the real trails had.
I really love the trail history. In the movie that they showed at the center today, they talked about how the pioneers followed the trails that the mountain men made, and that the mountain men followed the rivers. In the interpretive center in Oregon, they said that through the Blue Mountains in Oregon, the pioneer trail was one that was built on the trails that the Native Americans used to travel.
When we stayed at Emigrant Springs state park, which was within view of I-84, which pretty much follows the Oregon Trail, I liked to think about all of the different uses for the trail, and all the different people who used it, and who still use it, carrying trailers full of merchandise now, instead of supplies for a new life, but still, it's being used.
After our stop in Independence, we moved on to Columbia, where we met Edwin, who is Mary's brother, and then went to have dinner with two more of Edwin's siblings and spouses and niece. The girls had a fine time catching fireflies and playing outside, and it was very nice to talk to everyone.
Tomorrow we hit the road early in hopes of making it to Louisville as soon as possible. I had the girls shower and pack tonight, and they have clothes set out to go in the car, but at 7am, when I'm ready to leave, the plan is for them to wake up and walk downstairs, then go right back to sleep. The other morning when I tried to wake them up as little as possible before getting in the car it didn't quite work, so I'm trying to have them do even less tomorrow morning. If this doesn't work, I may just give up and have them get up and actually help in the mornings!