ROADTRIP!

1300 Miles in Four Days

Well sir, I tell you what. It was the craziest thing I ever seen. This boy drove hisself into town, whirled around the city a few times, and then I'll be danged if he didn't jest drive hisself right back the way he come.

-A yokel commenting on Dave's recent trip to Indianapolis

This past weekend, while Melissa and company were out gallivanting and terrorizing small Polish towns, I took advantage of my four day weekend to take a whirlwind adventure out to the land of corn and 70 mph speed limits¹.

It was a good trip, albeit a fast one. It takes so long to get there and Mom and dad's respective sides of the family being on opposite sides of Indianapolis doesn't help matters either.

I got to see a fair number of family members, but when your family grows to the prodigious size that ours has it becomes all but impossible to see everyone. The fact that my trip was so short notice, and therefore not adequately advertised, probably came into play as well. Had people known I was coming I'm sure more of them would have made arrangements to be out of town.

I got to see grandma, which was good as I hadn't seen her in over a year. She seems to be doing fairly well all things considered. Unfortunately, I didn't catch her on a very good day, so the conversation was even more one sided than usual.

While I was out there I also took the time to see some of Gidget's family. In fact, I had to do the least amount of traveling to see them. I guess that's the advantage of living on Aunt Barb's back porch.

Gidget's mother is the cat on the right and her sister is on the left. She did have two other siblings, but I don't think either of them survived to adulthood.

After visiting with the cats I took a quick trip up to see Grandpa and Uncle Paul + Co. Here you can kind of see us sitting down to a game of The Settlers of Catan. That is, you can see some of the initial set up procedures occurring if you can distract yourself from Nathan being Nathan.

That's more or less a complete summary of my trip. There are only two complaints I have about the entire weekend:

1. The massive delays on I-70 while I was headed home, which caused me to sit in traffic for 2.5 hours and forced me to stop halfway, were a major downer. So was the total lack of signs as to what was going on to force traffic to back up for 10 miles.
2. I now have a new gaming obsession. At least this one is a board game which will force me to actually socialize with people.

-Dave

¹Indiana has just recently raised the speed limit on their portion of I-70 to 70 mph; a fact which great pleases the East coast members of our clan. Now if we could just get Ohio and Pennsylvania to do the same, we could just set the cruise control to 78 the entire way out there.