The rest of our trip was up I-95. All the destination signs said "New York", which is a little over 150 miles away. We were going about two-thirds of that distance, stopping at the south end of Philadelphia. (Philly, even though it's one of the largest cities in the country, didn't appear as a destination until we got to Wilmington, Delaware, which was about 15 miles from our destination.) We cruised around the rest of the beltway and then up 95 past Joppatowne, Aberdeen (where we saw the new stadium named after and owned by Cal Ripken), and Havre de Grace. The interstate here is allegedly a free highway (it appears in blue in the atlas), but there's a toll bridge over the Susquehanna River just past Havre de Grace. I was expecting to pay 50˘ or maybe a dollar, but the bridge--which is tiny compared to a lot of the Mississippi bridges--costs a full $5 per vehicle. For $5 you can cross the entire state of Indiana on the turnpike, and it seemed more than a little excessive for one little bridge.
We had more toll to pay when we got to Delaware. The Delaware Turnpike is fourteen miles long (essentially the width of the state at this point), but you have to pay $2 for the privilege of being stuck in almost constant congestion-even on a Sunday evening-along it. The "New York" signs avoid the city of Wilmington and head east to join the New Jersey Turnpike. I-95, by contrast, winds its way right through downtown Wilmington, a four-lane monstrosity that has to be one of the worst interstates anywhere. Wilmington is not a very big city (maybe the size of Waterloo), but I swear they have a 15 mph exit for every warehouse and every factory in the place.
Wilmington ended abruptly at the Pennsylvania border. The interstate widened to six lanes, and for about five miles the surrounding area was positively rural. Then, just as suddenly, we were in the Philadelphia suburbs.
I had printed out directions to all our hotels before we left for this trip, and I had read through them several times. I was pretty sure I knew the directions for tonight's destination, so I didn't bother digging up the print copy from deep in my bag. My mind told me to take Exit 12, which is precisely what we did. This was the exit for Philadelphia International Airport, which made some sense since ours was an airport hotel. Unfortunately Exit 12 didn't lead in any direct way to the roads near the airport; it lead right straight into the airport itself. We drove around the circle road that led past all the terminals, stopping periodically behind taxis and car rental shuttles. Once I had committed to this road, there was no way to go back, so I just kept circling. Finally, when we were almost back to the interstate, I saw a sign leading to an abrupt right turn that led to "Bartram Avenue", the road we wanted. (I had totally missed Exit 10, which leads directly to Bartram Avenue.) We drove past the shell of a car that had been abandoned after an accident and made our way to the same strip of hotels where Margaret and I had stayed a few years ago. Before long we checked in at the Fairfield Inn.
The good thing about this hotel was that it was far enough from everything that there was pretty much no way the kids could possibly get in trouble. (They basically sat around their rooms or swam in the pool all evening.) The bad news, which I remembered from having stayed here before with Margaret, was that it was close to nothing but other motels. A single restaurant (Ruby Tuesday's-I've never eaten at one of those; it looked expensive and didn't appear to be a place the kids would want to eat) serves more than a dozen mid-range and luxury accommodations. Someone could make a fortune by opening a Wendy's or a Subway in this development.
Daryl and I went out in one of the suburbans to see if we could find something else to eat. Bartram Avenue is a four-lane state highway and appears to be a major commuter artery, so it seemed logical that there ought to be somewhere to eat along it. We drove northward, but all we passed were hotels, office parks, and a few old rowhouses. Before long the road had looped around and re-joined interstate 95. That didn't seem too bad, because we figured we'd just go up an exit, and if there wasn't food we would just turn around and come back. What we didn't know was that I-95 was about to become an extremely high viaduct, soaring far above a vast industrial area surrounding the port of Philadelphia. There are no exits for about five miles as we made our way along the bridge. The next exit was for Pattison Avenue, the location of Philadelphia's sports complex. We passed the Spectrum and the nearby hockey arena, but even in this neighborhood there was nowhere to eat. It made me wonder just where Philadelphians do go when they want a quick bite. We followed signs for I-95 south, but it would be quite a while before we were back on the interstate. The signs took us onto Penrose Avenue, another high viaduct that parallels 95 above the industrial wasteland. We finally re-joined the interstate out by the airport and then almost immediately exited back onto Bartram Avenue. We never did find anywhere to eat.
The kids, possessing a wisdom far greater than Daryl's or mine, had sent out for pizza, and once we got back to the motel, that's exactly what Daryl and I did, too. I got out my cell phone and called Original Pete's, one of two pizza places listed in the business guide in our hotel room. The pizza took about half an hour to come from their location in nearby Essington, and it turned out to be both affordable and tasty--particularly as hungry as I was by the time it came. After eating I read through some newspapers and then settled into bed for the night.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Camden, New Jersey
Fairfield Inn has one of the best breakfasts of any hotel chain. While I enjoyed a wide assortment of pastries and fruit, most of the kids had fresh waffles. They also had both hot and cold cereals, at least five different kinds of juice, and excellent coffee. Unless someone thought of breakfast as eggs, meat, and hash browns, they'd be sure to find something they liked here.
We left the hotel and walked north for about half a mile along Bartram to the Eastwick commuter train station. Before leaving on the trip I had purchased day passes that were good for a one-way ride on the commuter train, plus unlimited rides on transit within the city. We boarded a train, and about half an hour later we arrived at Market East station in downtown Philadelphia.
Market East station is in the basement of an enormous mall with a surprisingly broad assortment of stores. A couple of the kids wanted to pick up film, and we stopped into a downtown K-Mart store in the mall so they could buy what they needed. They seemed to take forever to make their purchases (I think they circled the entire store before they found the camera department), but eventually we all left again.
We walked east and north to the Philadelphia Mint. Margaret and I had toured this a few years ago, and the kids were looking forward to seeing it. Unfortunately a guard stopped us in front of the building and rather rudely informed us that any tours now had to be arranged 90 days in advance. I assume the change is since the terrorist attacks, but I had to wonder why they felt the mint was a target anyone would care about. Modern coins aren't made of precious metal, and while there is quite a bit of value in the coins there, it would be difficult for anyone to make off with in an efficient way. The mint has always had good security, and virtually closing it to the public just seems silly. One of the kids joked about how terrorists would find the perfect way to attack a country-to cut off their coin supply. Even if someone did bomb the mint (which, of course, they could still do with a car bomb on the street), it still wouldn't cut off the coin supply. Mints in Denver and San Francisco would certainly pick up the slack, and the vast majority of coins in use are already in circulation.
We headed south from the mint to a new visitors' center they've set up for tourists who want to visit Independence Hall. This is also a post-9/11 development. They still let people visit Independence Hall (which to me seems like a more symbolic target than the mint), but you need to get a timed ticket to go there. The whole area around Independence Hall (including several other historic buildings) is secured, including the nearby streets. You have to go through security and present your timed tickets to get anywhere near the place. The earliest passes we could get were for 2pm (we were told to be at security no later than 1:15), so we had pretty much all morning to kill.
I essentially insisted that the kids divide into two groups today. I was interested in seeing a sight across the river, the Battleship New Jersey. Some of the kids thought that sounded interesting, but others didn't want to go there because it cost money. (What they didn't realize was that to go inside anything in Philadelphia other than Independence Hall also costs money.) Daryl agreed to take the rest on a walking tour around the historic area, using brochures they had at the visitors' center.
My group walked west on Market Street back to Market East. Across the street from the mall is a subway station for PATCO, the train that crosses the river to New Jersey. For a relatively new transit system (the tickets celebrated their thirtieth anniversary a couple of years back), PATCO comes across as old and dumpy. My bet is that it was "space age" in the '70s and hasn't had any updates since then.
PATCO is different from SEPTA, the system whose day passes I had bought, so we had to buy separate tickets to go across the river. PATCO's tickets are weird. They have to be the first electronic tickets ever produced. They are made of a thick, rubbery plastic, and the entire back (not just a strip, but the whole back) is coated with magnetic material. You buy the tickets from an old-fashioned vending machine of the sort they used to sell gum in at gas stations. You insert some coins (in our case $1.10 worth of them) and then pull out on a lever that releases the ticket. To use the ticket, you insert them horizontally at the top of the turnstile. If there is value left (that is, if it's a round-trip ticket or a pass), the ticket comes out the other side; if not the machine just eats the ticket. Either way the gate unlocks and you can go down to the platform.
The PATCO station showed just how much something can age in thirty years. It was built of stainless steel, with enamel highlights in that dull aqua color that used to be de rigueur for institutional construction. "8TH & MARKET" was also spelled out in aqua letters on the steel wall across the tracks. Every surface was coated with thirty years of grime, and anything that could be carved in was cut up with two generations of graffiti. The only thing new in the entire station was a map of the system that was designed for the visually impaired. The line and its stations were raised up, and the station names were given in Braille as well as text. The map was brand new, and it looked hopelessly out of place compared with everything else.
We boarded a train bound to Lindenwold. They have two types of cars on PATCO, and this one fit the station where we boarded. The body was a beige-colored molded plastic, and the seats were upholstered with a well-worn avocado and gold plasticized fabric. There were no announcements, nor anyway other than looking out the window to know where we were. In fact the only sound other than people talking was a loud, shrill B-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-P that signaled that the doors were about to close.
The PATCO line runs past an abandoned station at Franklin Square and then rises to cross the Delaware on the Ben Franklin Bridge. Just across the bridge we passed a brand new baseball stadium (Campbell's Park) right along the waterfront. The train then descended back to the subway, and we got off two stations later in downtown Camden, New Jersey. Below ground this station looked almost identical to the 8th & Market station in Philly, the only real difference being that the accents were a dull pink rather than aqua. Upstairs the Camden Transportation Center was an important bus interchange as well as one of the main stops on a brand new light rail system.
We might have taken the light rail, but we just missed a train. Service on the River Line (which runs from Camden to the state capital of Trenton) is only every 20 minutes, and I knew it would be quicker to walk to our destination than to wait.
The walk down Mickle Avenue was definitely not one of the most enjoyable features of this trip, though. A century ago Camden was a grand industrial powerhouse. The ballpark we passed is named for Campbell's Soup, which is headquartered here. If you check a can, though, you'll find that these days most of the soup we buy in America is actually made in Canada. The other big industry in Camden's past was RCA. A downtown tower is still topped with a likeness of Nipper, the little dog who was amazed to hear "his master's voice" played back on a recording. The RCA plant is also closed, and so are pretty much all the other factories in Camden. In the early '90s Camden had the distinction of being the single poorest city in America. Since then the state of New Jersey has pumped an incredible amount of money into Camden (the billion-dollar light rail system is the most recent infusion of money), and they've managed to transform Camden from destitute to merely dirt poor. Most of the city is still not exactly a pleasant place, though. We passed two open businesses on our walk: a CVS drugstore and a bank whose selling point was that they were open seven days a week. We then passed the city police headquarters, the brand new Camden County Jail, and Riverview Place (a high-rise public housing project). The street was pretty much deserted, and it would be hard to have felt more out of place as we walked along.
The scenery changes abruptly at the waterfront. Most of the money the state has pumped in here has gone into transforming the waterfront from an abandoned industrial port (not unlike the area we drove above on I-95 yesterday) to a high price tourist destination. The whole waterfront is a lovely park, and there are three big attractions along it: Tweeter Center (a brand new concert arena), the New Jersey State Aquarium, and the Battleship New Jersey.
The kids had seen a brochure for the Battleship New Jersey at the visitors' center in Philly, and they were especially looking forward to a side attraction it offered. There was supposed to be a "four-dimensional flight simulator". (I think the fourth dimension was supposed to be going back in time to different wars.) We passed the simulator as we came up on the ticket office, and it was moving up and down. Unfortunately walking past it was all we would do. They were testing the simulator, but apparently it would not actually open to the public until July.
We bought some overpriced tickets ($12 I think) for the battleship, put on wristbands, and set out to the gate. A guard told us we would be taking the starboard tour and that we should "follow the red line in and the yellow line out". They had a variety of colored lines painted all over the ship, like some hospitals do to show which way different departments are. We made our way on board and began to follow the red line.
Our first stop was in front of the guns at the front of the ship. The boys wanted to pose for a picture there, showing their muscles--comparing their "big guns" with those on the ship. As we made our way through the ship we stopped again for several other pictures: the boys sitting in the admiral's chair, the boys sleeping in the "coffins" where enlisted men spent the night, the boys operating the telegraph, etc. There was nothing saying photography was forbidden and nothing saying we couldn't sit in the furniture or touch things on the ship, so I'm hoping we did nothing wrong. The kids had fun, and while there wasn't anything special to see, it we all had an enjoyable morning.
It was very hot this morning, and after walking all over the ship we were all thirsty and could also use a snack. They had vending machines and a food stand outside the ship, but the prices were absolutely ridiculous. A bottle of pop was $3.50, and an ice cream bar sold for $4.75. We chose not to waste so much money so foolishly and went on our way.
As hot as it was, we figured it would be much more pleasant to take the light rail line than to walk, but once again we just missed the train. The local paper had an editorial today that was complaining that ridership on the line was far below expectations. If you ask me, the reason is that they offer such infrequent service. No one wants to wait twenty minutes to catch a train, particularly in a neighborhood that might not be all that safe. If they ran twice as many trains, they'd probably quadruple their ridership.
We slowly made our way back down Mickle Avenue, sweating profusely with each step. I was intrigued to see Walt Whitman's home, which I remember visiting with my father the summer before I started at Garrigan. Back in the '80s, Whitman's home was part of a set of rowhouses in a neighborhood that was mostly rowhouses. Today it's a single brick building, standing in the middle of the block all by itself. All the rest of the rowhouses have been torn town, most likely replaced by the nearby housing project.
We stopped at the CVS Pharmacy to get something to drink. The kids were just a bit surprised to be the only Anglo whites in a store mostly full of black people, with a few Hispanics here and there. I can remember the first time I had a similar experience. It was right here in Camden on that same trip with my dad. The two of us stopped at a McDonalds about a mile east of here where absolutely everyone--worker or customer--was Hispanic. I always pictured my father as a fairly well-traveled person, but I got the feeling it was the first time he had been in such a situation, too. I remember him being proud that I was able to speak Spanish when neither of us understood what the clerk was trying to say in English.
We went back to the subway and boarded a train marked "Phila". This time we were in a brand new car with stainless steel construction and red plaid upholstery. Computer read-outs at each end showed the upcoming stations, and we could also hear the driver announce where we were stopping. Most surprisingly was that the driver also said "Phila"-as in "8th and Market, downtown Phila." when referring to the largest city in Pennsylvania. I've heard "Philly", but "Phila" was new to me.
It was about 12:30 when we arrived at 8th & Market. We found a shady park just east of the security entrance for Independence Hall and waited there for the rest of the group. As we waited we entertained ourselves by feeding pigeons bits of potato chips we had bought at the drugstore.
Around 1:00 the other group showed up, having completed less than half of the walking tour. Both groups seemed to have enjoyed their mornings, though the walking tour group repeatedly made the comment (overstated, but not untrue) that everything in Philadelphia was fake. A lot of the historic buildings were re-constructed in the 1970s (for the American bicentennial) on the site of something from the 18th Century. The boys in my group rubbed in how much fun they had (in retrospect walking through a bad neighborhood was fun for them), and they made up story after story about how exciting the 4-D flight simulator had been.
We had been told to arrive quite early to make our way through security, but we needn't have bothered. They had a metal detector that appeared to be off; I think you could have driven a car through there and it wouldn't have detected any metal. They also made us put our bags on a counter. They didn't X-ray them; they just had us collect them on the other side of the metal detector. It took maybe two minutes for our entire group to go through the procedure, and maybe five more minutes to see the Liberty Bell and the accompanying exhibits, which are housed in the same building.
We crossed the blocked-off street and had about 45 minutes to wait in the plaza behind Independence Hall. Our captain called KLGA again to let them know the how we did in the remainder of the tournament (there's less of an incentive to call quickly when you lose than when you win), and we killed some other time chatting with an elderly couple who was visiting from England.
The Independence Hall tour was much more minimal than Margaret and I had gotten a few years back. After a film about the history of the place and a lecture from the guide telling us not to eat, drink, or chew gum, we saw the two main rooms on the lower floor of the building. That's it-nothing upstairs and none of the outlying areas. The whole thing took about 15 minutes, but we had to wait five hours before we could do it. The kids found what should have been a highlight of the trip to be a major let-down.
Every single boy in the group had one other thing they wanted to see in Philly: the Philadelphia Museum of Art which is best known for the steps the title boxer ran up in the movie Rocky. Many in our group were track or cross-country runners, and running up the "Rocky steps" was something they were definitely looking forward to. The lone girl in the group was less excited about seeing them, so the boys went with me while the girl finished the walking tour with Daryl and Angie.
We made our way to a nearby SEPTA subway station and took the train to City Hall. Our plan was to catch a bus there that would head up Ben Franklin Parkway to the art museum. We couldn't find a bus stop in the immediate vicinity of City Hall, so we just began walking up the parkway, figuring we'd pause at the first stop and wait there for a bus. We saw bus after bus head down the parkway, but nowhere did there seem to be any bus stops. So, hot as it was, we just kept walking.
Our only stop was at the Rodin Museum, where the boys posed out front in their best imitations of the famous "Thinker". By the time we were there, it was just a little bit more on to the art museum. It's a little less than two miles total, not the easiest walk on a hot day.
The kids left their cameras with me at the bottom, hoping I would be able to get pictures of them running up. By the time I had gotten about two shots the whole group was already at the top. (They are runners, after all.) I slowly walked up the steps myself and returned each person's cameras to him. There was a middle-aged black man at the top of the steps who seemed to permanently plant himself there offering to take photos of tourists for tips. I don't think any of the kids tipped him, but he took their pictures anyway--so they all go their souvenirs.
We walked back down the parkway, again seeing bus after bus, but not a single bus stop. I suppose they must use the parkway as an express route, with stops only at the ends. Come to think of it, though, we didn't see any stops at the ends either. About halfway back we stopped at a street vendor, where I bought an Italian ice and most of the kids got pop. That refreshed us enough to make it back downtown.
The kids had pretty much seen everything they wanted to see in Philly and said they were ready to head back to the hotel. There wasn't much of anything I was dying to see either, so we went to nearby Suburban station and bought tickets to go back to Eastwick. While we waited for a train I had coffee and a delicious cinnamon and fig scone from a stand on the platform.
We made it back to the hotel, and the kids swam in the pool while I read through a stack of newspapers. I waited a long time for Daryl to return, but they were obviously making a longer day of it than we did. I was getting hungry, so I decided to drive the other direction on Bartram from the way we had gone yesterday to see if there was anything that way. I couldn't help but notice that the wrecked car we had seen yesterday was still sitting at the side of the street.
Driving south didn't seem too hopeful at first. If anything it seemed even less developed than the northern route. Before long, though, I came to Essington, home of the Original Pete's pizza parlor we had ordered from last night. Essington is a town of old brick rowhouses and grand Victorian homes that has grown from its own entity into a minor suburb of Philadelphia. The highway splits into two one-way streets in Essington, and I stopped at a McDonalds that occupied the block entire block between the two one ways. (It reminded me of a McD's where I used to stop for coffee when I was student teaching that had a very similar location in downtown Ottumwa.)
I had planned to have another fiesta salad, but they didn't have any of those (even though there were posters all over the restaurant advertising them). The clerk suggested Cobb salad, which I'd had once before (at the Hard Rock Café in Paris), and I decided that sounded good. I drove back to the Fairfield Inn and watched Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune on TV as I ate my salad. It really wasn't very good. The vegetables weren't especially fresh, and it automatically came with a bleu cheese dressing that I didn't care for at all. I ate about half of it and dumped the rest.
Daryl arrived just as I got rid of the last of my salad. He hadn't eaten anything since lunch and suggested we again order pizza. Since I hadn't exactly stuffed myself on salad, I agreed, and we again used my cell phone to call Original Pete's. We ate pizza as we flipped between the Stanley Cup final and a Cubs/Cardinals game on TV.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Toledo, Ohio
I didn't sleep well last night. I think something in the salad didn't agree with me. Whatever the reason, I spent the night with indigestion and gas.
One of the boys in our group had spent much of the previous evening flirting with the girl at the desk. She had repaid his affection by making us the "Guests of the Day". They put our group on a sign by the entrance and presented one of the rooms with a basket of snacks--not that they needed any snacks; they still had half the stuff left that they had lugged all the way from Algona.
We had breakfast, checked out, and left the hotel around 9:15am. I had purposely dawdled a bit this morning to avoid leaving right at rush hour. Even so it was very busy as we headed north on I-476, which decades ago might have conceivably been called a beltway. There was an accident on 476. Fortunately it didn't really back up traffic, but we got to see a wide range of emergency vehicles trying to make their way through the mess of traffic.
I-476 becomes the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the northwest corner of Philadelphia. The turnpike was one of the first expressways ever built. It was apparently built to the standards of the German autobahn, and engineers of more modern interstates learned a lot from the mistakes they made in those early roads. The turnpike was built on the absolute minimum possible amount of land. It's four lanes wide, with a cement barrier in the middle running its whole length. There is no real shoulder on either side, just a couple of feet of asphalt on the right and only inches before the cement barrier on the left. The road has a 65-mph speed limit, but tight curves frequently carry warning speeds as low as 40 mph. About the only good thing about it is that the exits are very infrequent--as much as thirty miles apart--so you don't have to worry about merging traffic.
We took the turnpike north past Allentown. In my mind I could hear Bruce Springsteen singing:
Well, we're living here in Allentown,
And they're closing all the factories down;
Out in Bethlehem they're marking time
Filling out forms, standing in line. ...
Allentown is probably better off now than it was when I first heard that song in college, but it's still not a place I'd bet President Bush goes to campaign. We passed one nice mall, but we passed a lot more shells of factories and warehouses and empty, grimy old rail yards. I mentioned Ottumwa in yesterday's journal, and Allentown reminded me quite a bit of an overgrown Ottumwa--an old industrial city that long ago saw its better days.
We exited the turnpike onto I-80 and soon after stopped at a Wendy's at Mt. Pocono. Most in the group really weren't hungry, so we mostly used the restroom and then were on our way again.
I-80 in Pennsylvania is a lovely highway through some of the most rugged terrain in America. It's scenic and carries remarkably little traffic, and it has the type of modern grades and curves that the Pennsylvania Turnpike lacks. Its only real problem today was construction. About every twenty miles they'd have a three- or four-mile section of rather nasty construction. Nothing was dreadfully bad, but it got a bit annoying.
All this time the white suburban was still sort of limping along. We had tested out the air conditioning again by Baltimore, but it still didn't work. The voltmeter was still showing less charge than it should, but it was still above the warning area. So the kids who had chosen the white suburban because they thought it would be the comfier one to ride in ended up spending the trip with the windows rolled down in the blazing sun, and they couldn't watch all those videos they'd hauled along. At least the vehicle still seemed to work, though. The last thing I wanted to do was to have major service on a school vehicle in unfamiliar territory.
We stopped for a late lunch in the town of DuBois (I think it's pronounced doo-BOYS) in central Pennsylvania. I was resting for the next leg, so I sat back and read newspapers as Daryl drove along. We cruised through western Pennsylvania until we hit the brakes and came to a dead stop right before the Ohio border. It was stop and go and mostly crawling as we inched forward for about five miles. Finally, just inside Ohio, we saw the reason for the delay. The single biggest vehicle I have ever seen pulled into the rest area just past the border. The truck was so wide that no one could pass it, even on the interstate, and while it had a single flatbed trailer, it was as long as most double-bottoms. The only load looked to be quite small, but must have been extremely heavy. (I pondered if it might not be some ultra heavy metal like plutonium). It was centered right in the middle of that huge trailer, with lots of padding all around it. The truck had obviously been going very slowly, and no one could get around it.
We stopped for gas at a Speedway station in Youngstown and then had a long drive across Ohio. The good news, though, is that almost all of the Ohio Turnpike is six lanes, which made for relatively pleasant driving the rest of the day.
Tonight I had made reservations at the Econolodge-Toledo/South, which was just off I-80 at Exit 59. This was a very strange hotel. The place looks like it used to be a nice convention center, but they let it go to seed. Now the property is divided into two hotels that share a common area. The northern wings of the old convention center are the Econolodge, while the southern wings are a Quality Inn. Both hotels share the same lobby, pool, and game room.
When we got to the hotel the girl at the desk had no record of my reservation. When I showed her the print-out I had made with confirmation numbers, she said they had recently updated their computer system; the reservation must have gotten lost in the transfer. It's been a while since I've heard "the computer must have lost it" as an excuse, but that's what they gave me here. Fortunately neither hotel on the site was remotely close to full, so getting a room was no problem. In fact, I actually paid slightly less than the rate I had originally booked. The one "problem" was that hotel policy supposedly required that there be at least one person 21 or older in each room. There had been nothing in their online information to indicate that; if there had been, I wouldn't have booked the place to begin with. I think Angie is 21 (though I'm not positive of that), but even with Daryl and me, that left us one person short--not to mention that Daryl and I would be sharing the same room. Hopefully I won't burn in hell for saying that Daryl and I were in separate rooms, that Angie was indeed 21, and that the largest of the boys was also 21. (He may well have the fake ID to prove it, but I'm not going there.) All the girl really wanted was some responsible person's name on each of the four room slips, and I gave her exactly what she wanted.
While the kids liked this motel, I hated the place. They enjoyed the public areas-the Olympic-sized pool, the hot tub, the game room, and the nicely decorated lobby. I squinted my eyes in the dimly lit room, cursed a shower that barely dripped, got a backache from a too-soft bed, and couldn't help but notice a series of patched holes in the wall. This was by far the cheapest of the hotels I had booked, and it definitely showed. The Econolodge in Arlington was quite pleasant, but I'd be glad to be leaving here.
* * * * *
Daryl, Angie, and I walked down the street to what has to be America's most northerly Waffle House to have dinner. (It turned out that all the kids, in three separate groups, eventually went to eat at that same Waffle House.) I had the ham dinner and chili, while both Angie and Daryl had the chopped steak dinner, cooked medium well. (I didn't know you could cook hamburger to any particular degree of doneness.) The Waffle House was empty except for the three of us and the workers. That was kind of eerie, since usually those diners are full.
I got some money from an ATM (since I spent about half that $20 at Waffle House), and then squinted in the bad light to read through some more papers at the motel. We watched CNN and then an NBA play-off game on TV. The game went into overtime and then double-overtime. They were playing in California, so it was a reasonable time there, but it was well after midnight Eastern time when we finally got to sleep.
Toledo, Ohio to Algona, Iowa
The motel offered a tray of doughnuts and an urn of coffee as their continental breakfast. I had told the kids to be ready to leave at 7:30. We were actually off at 7:45, but that was okay--my "official" schedule had us down for an 8:00 departure.
We stopped briefly at a dumpy little convenience store in Howe, Indiana. Some of us got breakfast, while a few of the boys picked up minor fireworks. If they were looking for serious contraband, they were disappointed, though. Indiana has slightly more liberal fireworks laws than Iowa, but nowhere east of us really has legal fireworks--and to my mind that's a good thing.
There had been signs since the Ohio border that warned of construction on I-80 in Gary and warned "EXPECT LONG DELAYS". There are always delays on I-80 in Gary; it was that word "long" that caught my attention. Heeding the warning of those signs, we exited east of Gary and took U.S. 30 across Chicagoland. This was probably not a wise choice. When I'm just driving myself, I can enjoy taking 30, even though it is mostly stop and go traffic. When two vehicles are trying to follow each other, though, it did not make for a pleasant drive. My bet is that it took just as long on 30 as it would have on 80, and it was probably more frustrating.
We made it through Indiana, though. I decided to stop for a break at a McDonalds in Olympia Fields, Illinois-straight south of the city of Chicago. We soon got back onto I-80, and traffic moved well through the rest of Chicagoland. We stopped for gas at a truck stop in Morris (the first thing of significance west of Chicagoland), stopped again at a rest area by West Branch, Iowa, and made our final stop for dinner at a Kwik Star convenience store in Janesville.
It absolutely poured as we made our way up Avenue of the Saints from Waverly to Charles City. I thought a couple of times of pulling off, and I wondered how miserable things were in the white suburban. It was still hot, and with the windows rolled up and no air conditioning it was likely becoming unbearable. No one complained, though. Just as I convinced myself I really should pull off, the rain let up. By the time we got to Mason City it was bright and sunny.
We let one of our team members off at her home in Wesley and then stopped at the Town Mart store to let off the rest of the Wesley delegation. The rest of used the bathroom there, and Garrigan student Samantha Kirsch greeted us all and asked how the trip had gone. We finally made it back to Algona about 8pm.
There's not much to tag on to the end this time. We had a good trip, and-with just a few quirks-this was a good group to travel with. While most of this group has graduated now, we have a number of smart younger kids, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens in the future.
The background music on this page is an instrumental version of Queen's "Spread Your Wings".