champaign, il

OK, actually Urbana, but that Old 97s song has been going through my head all day.  A fine start to the road trip, according to Google Maps we’re exactly 25% of the way to Crawford Notch.  Yikes.  This is going to be a long trip.

But spirits are high.  We got a mid-morning start today, which gave me time to get a pretty fierce workout in and let the kids sleep in for a bit.  Breakfast was whatever was in the fridge (a lot of yogurt, which probably wasn’t wise), and the first tomato of the season, which I just grabbed as I was getting in the car.  I think we managed to get everything required, though I’m sure we’ve forgotten something crucial.

The drive was pretty standard.  Lunch at the Iowa City Steak and Shake, where this time we remembered to get kids shakes for both of them, eliminating the gross imbalance that happened last week.  And we stocked a cooler full of apples, carrots, and candy, the deal being that we only re-stock candy when we need to re-stock healthy food.  It worked–we made it through a whole bag of apples today.

Shampoo-Banana is both hometown and alma mater, so the kids asked to see the spots we saw in the Spring again–the old family homestead, the Quad, the church where K and I got married, etc.  We ran around on the cross country course for a while, and C asked whether we’d ever sled down it.  Oh, man, I said, and regaled them with tales of our old Yankee Flyer, a pilfered candle or two, and break-neck runs down the steeper bits on wobbly metal runners.

Papa Del’s for dinner, of course.  When we got into the hotel room there was a menu from Pizza Hut sitting on the desk.  “Why would you ever get Pizza Hut in this place,” C asked, “when Papa Del’s is right down the street?”  Why, indeed.  The boy definitely has a pretty refined pizza palate, at any rate.

We’re all pretty tired tonight, but we have a BIG DAY planned tomorrow, one that’s probably just a bit too crazy and that probably won’t all work, but if it does it will be, as O says, epic.

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