It's good to be home but oh what fun it is to get away! Hubby and I just returned from our summer vacation. We went to Redwood Falls, Minnesota to attend a family reunion and then on the way home stopped by to visit Sarah, Ricky, and the boys at their new home in San Antonio Texas. Yes, I am aware that San Antonino is not exactly on the way home.
Before setting out on our summer adventure, hubby and I pooled our spare change and headed to Wal*Mart (that's how my grandson spells it, "Dubba you, aye, ell, star . . . ") to pick out a GPS. We chose the cheapest one Wal*Mart had to offer, a Tom Tom.
I programmed Tom Tom to take us to our motel in Redwood Falls, to the Odeon Building in Belview where the reunion was to be held, and to Sarah's address in San Antonio. I couldn't set it for our San Antonio motel because I couldn't come up with a street address for it. It didn't matter, it was only a few blocks from Sarah's home and we could search POI's from there. This was enough to get us up and running. I hoped.
I began fooling around with the gadget and playing with the different settings. I chose the daylight color scheme, the night time setting, and I got to choose the voice that would be bossing us around for the next nine or ten days. Though I was leery of having two Richards in the car both telling me how to drive (and listening to neither), I chose the one called Richard because it was the least obnoxious of my choices. Note to self: look to see if I can download additional voices.
Thursday night when I returned from my nightly visit with my dad, Rick asked me what time I planned on leaving in the morning (as if he was leaving it all up to me). I had my answer ready and I predicted his response because I had already had this conversation with my daughter the day before. When Laura asked me what time we were leaving I told her between 7:00 and 8:00AM. There was no reason to leave any earlier. If we decided to drive straight through (18 hours and 39 minutes according to Tom Tom, road time)we'd be arriving Saturday morning before the sun rose, or anybody else for that matter. If we decided to spend a night on the road, there was even less reason to hurry. The big reason for leaving not so early was that it was already 8:30PM and I hadn't begun to pack. I was going to be up really late. And I was right as usual. Rick argued that we needed to leave no later than 6:00AM. For what, I've no idea. As I told Laura, he could plan to leave at whatever time makes him happy. He wasn't leaving without me and I wasn't going to be ready by 6:00. We left at 7:30AM right on (my) schedule.
Tom Tom turned out to be a great companion early on in the trip. It usually takes us both to navigate through Nashville. We are not accustomed to big city driving and are easily thrown off our groove with the interstate constantly dividing and throwing us first one way then the next. Tom Tom gives us a two mile heads up and points in the direction of our next turn. Nashville went smoothly without a single four lettered word. From here on we fondly referred to Richard, the voice of Tom Tom, as Dick (since we already had a Richard called Rick), our new travel companion and concierge.
Dick swiftly swept us from one interstate to the next, interchange after interchange without much interfering with my cruise control setting. That's good. Through Tennessee we went, into Kentucky, past the KY Lake, and over the KY Dam. Trivia: Is the "KY" in the KY lubricant named after the state or is the dam named for the sexual enhancement aid? Anyway we slipped (pun intended) in and out of Kentucky quickly and easily and before noon we were whizzing past the Lion's Den just across the Illinois border. Yes, Dick can even find a Lion's Den if you ask him. The other dick, the one driving, wouldn't stop.
Illinois. Obama's state. The state that has more orange sand buckets on the side of the road than Alabama has possums and proudly displays each one. The state with the crappiest roads in the nation. The highways are always under reconstruction, but never is there a mile of newly laid asphalt. Illinois' state maximum speed limit is 65mph. I warned my sister of this before she drove Mother up on Wednesday. She gave a snarl that indicated it would not slow her go. As it happened, we never reached 65 mph. There was not two miles of contiguous blacktop or concrete before running into those dreaded luminous orange signs popping up before us with speed limits of 60, then 55, then 50, and sometimes 45 or less. Some signs even boasted $10,000 fine for hitting a construction worker. They place only a $10,000 value on their workers? No wonder we only saw three such workers throughout the whole state. Three was all they had left. For a mere $10K you could cruise through at 85, 90mph. If you hit a worker or two just mail in your check. Bump, bump bump. I had the steering wheel to hold on to, Rick had the oh-shit-handle, but poor Dick didn't have anything. He just came flying gracefully off the dashboard onto the floorboard every quarter or half a mile or so with nary a complaint. But wait, wasn't it Dick's job to tell me there was a chunk of highway missing? I must have licked Dick twenty times or more over the course of the afternoon and resuctioned him to his post on the dash.
Enough about Illinois, oh except they do Mexican food about as well as road construction. We stopped just before Moline and ate at some Mexican restaurant. It was risky, yes, it's hard to know what you are getting with a strange Mexican restaurant but we took a chance. After ordering I was reading the awards on the wall. There were best Mexican restaurant awards from 2000 all the way to 2008. Certainly this place had merits. But it wasn't the cheese dip. The cheese dip was clumpy like cottage cheese, stringy like mozzarella cheese and tasted like wax paper. You just can't beat Camino Real. I don't care what their health rating is, we have never been served a bad meal there ever in eight or ten years, ever. I've even seen three roaches at that place over the years and I am willing to allow them three roaches in ten years because the food is excellent. There, that's all I'm going to say.
Friday night we traveled on to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Between 11:30 and midnight we spied a Super 8 and stopped in. We were assigned a room on the second floor (which meant at midnight I was going to have to carry my suitcases up a flight of stairs) that was non-smoking except that the last occupant had. It was awful! I ran back down the stairs and demanded a new room and fast. We were put in the room next door, it was musty smelling and hot because the air hadn't been turned on but there was no smoke and our queen bed had turned into two full beds. Two full beds trump a queen any day. Good night.
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