Miles: About 150

We got up about 7am, planning to leave the house between 8am and 8:15am to go back to visit Robb and his family some more. Breakfast somehow took longer than we anticipated – must have been Hofstadter’s law in action – so we ended up leaving at closer to 8:30. Not ruinously late, but enough that we were concerned about getting to Robb’s on time, especially if we ran into any traffic.

We retraced our route, and amazingly we actually arrived at 10am; spot on the time we’d told them to expected us. Getting there on time was aided somewhat by the fact that we had a better idea of where we were going, but it was still pretty remarkable.

We were warmly greeted again, and Robb was somehow able to be vertical and conscious despite the fact that he’d apparently been up most of the night and had only gone to bed at 4:15am. I remember the days when staying up until 4am wouldn’t have bothered me, but these days I need all the beauty sleep I can get! After we’d gone into the living room and chatted for a while, they brought out cards and a gift for SJ: the 5th of April is SJ’s birthday, so they had taken the opportunity to surprise her with early birthday things. After the family (with the exception of the new baby niece, of course) sang Happy Birthday for her, the nephews came over to explain the cards they had drawn for her. Some bits were a little hard to interpret, so this was very helpful of them. Robb and Alyssa gave SJ a gift that turned out to be a box of Goldfish that would be added to the car snacks.

After the cards and gift were opened, the boys returned to the basement where they had been watching a film. We sat and chatted with Rob and Alyssa for a while, eventually moving to the kitchen as lunch approached and food was prepared. While there, Robb showed us the kitchen scissors they had recently picked up, demonstrating how sharp they were by cutting part-way through a penny, and then cutting through some paper without a single blemish. He encouraged us to try it, and I got a little overenthusiastic and cut straight through the coin. Thankfully no one got beaned by the flying bit! He was about to go on to larger denomination coins, until he was dissuaded from this by his wife.

With lunch ready, the boys were summoned from the basement, along with the daughter of a friend that Robb and Alyssa were looking after for the day. Lunch itself was good: a chicken pot pie as the main dish, with a crumb crust rather than the pie shell SJ and I usually make, and Red Lobster biscuits. Both were very tasty, especially the biscuits, although I had to eat around the corn Alyssa had put into it (whole corn kernels and I tend not to agree well with each other). Dessert was ‘Blondie’, although I was unfortunately unable to partake of it as it contained Almond oil, and SJ and I ended up having to explain in some detail about intolerance to some substances. Of course, we’d forgotten to do anything helpful like mention anything about this to Alyssa ahead of time. We’re generally the ones having others over for meals – not the other way around! Allergy tends to be well known and recognised, but intolerance seems to be generally unknown or very misunderstood except by those who genuinely have one – not aided by the fact that many things people call ‘allergy’ are actually intolerance, and many people confuse intolerance with lifestyle choice.

From wikipedia:

Food intolerance is a detrimental reaction, often delayed, to a food, beverage, food additive, or compound found in foods that produces symptoms in one or more body organs and systems, but it is not a true food allergy. A true food allergy requires the presence of immune mechanisms against the food, and a food intolerance does not.

I’ll go ahead and take this opportunity in case any of our readers should try to feed us – if you’re not likely to, or if you’re currently eating, just skip this paragraph. This is what our off-limits food does to us; other people’s food intolerances, etc, will manifest in other ways. I can’t have mango – it brings me out in a rash. Corn, nuts of any sort in any form (including oil, extract, essence, ground nuts, chopped nuts, whole nuts, tree nuts, groundnuts, etc), and coconut (all forms, including dessicated, coconut oil, and coconut milk) are all out for Chris, though he’d love dearly to have them. They smell lovely, and he misses them. He’s intolerant, not allergic, so you can have them in the kitchen and put them in other people’s food – but if he eats any of this, he’ll be in the bathroom for a few solid days while his digestive system protests most vehemently. Yes, we’re awkward guests.

After lunch was cleared away, we decided that we should get some family photographs. Robb is an avid amateur photographer, so he pulled out his camera, tripod, and diffusers and we all went out into the yard. Out on the back deck it was gloriously sunny, and despite a chilly breeze that made wrangling the diffuser quite a challenge, it was a fairly comfortable temperature – not warm, but not cold enough to need coats. We posed for a number of shots, trying not to squint in the sun. After photos we returned to the house to chat for a while, but SJ and I needed to leave around 2pm as Aunt Doris was expecting us to get back around 3:30pm.

After saying our goodbyes, we got back on the road, practically familiar with the route at this point. We still had trouble remembering just where to stop for Aunt Doris’ house, however: she may live out in the countryside, but there are houses dotted along the road, and trying to remember just where hers is was surprisingly tricky. Despite this, we arrived on time, and shortly after we all piled into Uncle Bill’s car to head to Frankenmuth.

While writing up this entry, I began to wonder where the Most Northerly Point in the US I have been is. Thankfully that title goes to Seattle, where in 2007 I spent several days visiting friends I know online. It would have been somewhat disheartening to find that Frankenmuth holds any title other than “Most Persistently Tacky Tourist Trap” in the annals of my US escapades. The trip to Frankenmuth was enjoyable, along small roads through farmlands and small communities that lay quiet and well-tended, dare I say it even picturesque, in the afternoon sun. We drove into Frankenmuth, and into the back of the parking lot for the Bavarian Inn Restaurant, the fabled location of the world-famous Chicken Dinners.

We debated briefly between looking around the town, or heading into the restaurant despite the fact that it was only 4:30pm at this point. Aunt Doris was concerned that there might be a queue, so we headed for the restaurant, eventually finding our way there after following several corridors and ramps. There was indeed a queue of people waiting to be seated, and an insanely packed dining area beyond them with servers dressed in stereotypical Bavarian costume (dirndl for the females, lederhosen for the males) circulating through the packed and noisy booths and tables.

The Bavarian Inn Restaurant

A pair of Easter trees, apparently

The line slowly cleared, and we were finally seated in booth-style seating. The “Frankenmuth chicken” was chosen as the dish we’d have – I don’t think either SJ or I got to look at the menu, or at least for any length at this point – and it was explained that this was an ‘all you can eat’ style meal, except that they bring out refills for platters at your table rather than having a buffet. The food was less than impressive, and overpriced. There was quite a lot of food – many different dishes came and went, including that fried chicken – and service was decent, but overall we wouldn’t recommend it. Hey ho, you win some, you lose some.

After eating, we split up: Aunt Doris and Uncle Bill said that they would go back to the car and just let us wander around, so we headed down into the basement of the restaurant where they have a fine selection of tourist emporia selling a variety of standard tourist fare. We picked up some rock candy, and some saltwater taffy – there’s no point being in a tourist trap if you don’t get taffy while you’re there.

Returning to street level, we walked up the main street of Frankenmuth, looking around and taking photos as tourists are required to do, and occasionally going into shops that looked like they would be interesting. I will give Frankenmuth some credit: it makes no attempt to hide its tourist-trappiness, and it wears its colours proudly on its metaphorical sleeve, chest, back, and jauntily-angled baseball cap. The attempts at making “German Style” buildings came across to me more like the efforts of someone who had read descriptions of German and Austrian buildings, and had maybe seen photographs of small pieces of them, but they had only managed fleeting glimpses of full buildings, or streets of buildings. Wikipedia generously describes it as having a “strong influence of Franconian-style architecture”, to me it looked like someone had tried to bolt vaguely-Germanic-looking styles onto US conventional architecture.

Totally a German castle. Yep, I’m convinced.

One shop we went into was the “Frankenmuth Cheese Haus”, an establishment that lived up to its name by actually having some cheeses (plus the required selection of typical tourist tat). We picked up a couple of cheeses, but many of them we left well alone: some had nuts, so I couldn’t have them, while some had odd combinations of spices that sounded distinctly unappetising. They also had some mature cheeses of various grades, from reasonable age ones up to vintages that probably require everyone nearby to be in hazmat suits before opening the package. There were other shops we went into, only to find that they all sell pretty much the same tourist stuff presented in different ways. Amusing to look through to begin with certainly, but tiresome after the second shop or so.

Frankenmuth does have some interesting, and sometimes odd, street art though: near the Bavarian Inn Restaurant there is a fountain with maypole-dancing figures around its rim, lots of topiary sculpture along the street, a rather random but impressively-make sculpture outside the Marv Herzog Hotel (apparently no longer there), a cute cheese statue outside the cheese haus, and a bench with a tube that runs down from one end, loops over the bench, and then back up to the other end of the bench. Whisper into one end of the tube, and a person sat on the other end hears you through it.

Maypole statue near the visitor centre.	Well, that’s a rather cheesy sign.
The strange horse sculpture, with SJ for scale.	Bench sculpture, with some goofy-looking bloke for scale.

We did a loop up one side of the main street and back down the other side, and were about to cross the road again in front of the Bavarian Inn when we saw Uncle Bill looking for us. Apparently it had just gone 7pm, and Aunt Doris wanted to head back home, so we curtailed our wandering – really, we didn’t think there was much else to see anyway, and there’s only so much tourist tat a sane person can stand – and climbed back into the car. On the way out of Frankenmuth we passed through the one piece of architecture in the town that actually impressed me: a traditional Black Forest style covered wooden bridge that carries two lanes of vehicle traffic, and has pedestrian walkways on both sides.

If we had it to do over again, we’d have skipped Frankenmuth and spent the rest of the day with Robb and family. Live and learn; now we know for next time. It was an experience, anyway, and now we’ll get to compare it to the real Bavaria when we go soon! At least we got to spend time with Aunt Doris and Uncle Bill, which was also important.

Sunset, with nothing for scale. Pretty, though.

The trip back gave us some good views of the spectacular sunset, the sun slowly sinking behind a distant bank of clouds, rays of light shining through the breaks. By the time we got back to Aunt Doris and Uncle Bill’s house it was pretty much dark, and the temperature had started to drop rapidly. This was due to be our last night in Davison, so we sat chatting into the evening. Aunt Doris had gone to bed somewhere around 9pm, as she needed to be up and about especially early on Friday morning to help clean the office over at the farm, and around 10pm SJ and I decided it was time to sleep, as we wanted to get on the road as soon as we could the next day to get down to Waynesboro, Virginia at the top of the Blue Ridge Parkway. So we showered, did some packing ready for the morning, and got to bed.

After we had eaten breakfast, part of which involved entertaining Aunt Doris with my tea-making, we sat down to try to sort out what we were going to do. The farm next door is run by Glenda, one of the daughters of Aunt Doris and Uncle Bill, and Glenda’s husband Bill (she runs the admin side, while he runs the hands-on stuff. And yes, Bill is a popular name in parts of SJ’s family, apparently: Aunt Doris is married to a Bill, Aunt Faye is married to a Bill, and Glenda is too!). When we were talking the previous evening, Aunt Doris had talked about taking us around the farm, and possibly taking us up to Frankenmuth at some point, and she had arranged a dinner for us and their other daughter and her husband that coming evening. On top of those, SJ also wanted to go back to visit Robb and his family. But most of all, we needed to work out how many days we would be spending in Michigan now, after the delays caused by headlight problems and generally not getting as far each day as we originally planned – leaving late the first day, not getting as far as planned the second day because of headlights, not getting anywhere the next day, and so on.

After looking over maps and the spreadsheet SJ had worked out for the route, we decided that we’d be able to get back on schedule if we stayed in Michigan for three nights – two full days (the 3rd and 4th of April) – and then tried to cover the 620 or so miles from Flint, Michigan to the top of the Blue Ridge Parkway near Waynesboro, Virginia in one day instead of two, on the 5th.

So, now that we knew how long we were going to be in Michigan, we needed to decide how to spend the time. We decided that we’d go to Robb’s the next day, and Frankenmuth that evening, and that we’d stay closer to Aunt Doris’ for the rest of the current day, look around the farm, and of course enjoy the dinner that evening. We were going to go over to the farm, but first Uncle Bill wanted to show us his workshop…

Workshop is practically a misnomer: I’ve seen houses smaller than the space Uncle Bill has as a workshop. Uncle Bill does vinyl design and printing, and often gets called upon to make decals for vehicles (he’ll paint designs directly onto them too; he’s an accomplished artist). The ground floor of his workshop is a large open area where vehicles can be parked as he works on them (doubling as a garage), and the walls are adorned with a vast array of interesting things: painted sawblades (something I’d never run into before, although SJ tells me it’s quite common in rural parts of the US); models; cowboy figures Uncle Bill has carved from wood (he’s a big fan of cowboys); posters; paintings; drawings; decals; and even some musical instruments! Upstairs (I told you it was large…) is his office, where his computer, vinyl printer and cutter, and all the supplies for it are housed.

Uncle Bill’s woodcarving

Part of the Man Cave

Uncle bill showed us how he worked, going from basic images and photos, setting up everything in the PC, to how the vinyl printer and cutter works. After that, he started asking various Windows and general software-related questions, and I tried to help him out with a few things. SJ wandered back down to look at the artwork downstairs; she was still tired from having woken up so early so many days in a row, and it was quite hot in Uncle Bill’s office, so she needed to walk around somewhere cooler.

After answering Uncle Bill’s questions, we both went back down to join SJ, who had noticed the piano over in the corner. It turns out that Uncle Bill can actually play a range of instruments – including piano, guitar, violin, and several more – and he played the piano for us a bit. SJ was surprised to learn that Uncle Bill can’t read music, though: he has sheet music there, but that’s just for the lyrics to songs rather than for the music.

Aunt Doris came in towards the end of the musical interlude, probably to see whether we were lost in the man cave, and we all piled into their car to go to a place called Apollo Family Restaurant for lunch; not quite a local greasy spoon of a place, but it’s not far off. It was decent, with a variety of choices, and a comfortable enough place.

While we were at Apollo we ran into some of Uncle Bill’s relatives, including a recently widowed relative. I was Exhibit A once again, and was commanded to Talk To Them as they’d never met that most curious and peculiar of creatures known as the Englishman before. This is always a problem for me, as my reserves of smalltalk are essentially non-existent, and saying things like “Good morrow, completely unknown to me female of an older persuasion! I hear tell that your once-and-former hubby is now imitating the Norwegian Blue?” (video) is probably not the most tactful option in the world. I believe that the conversation involved some discussion of my occupation, not that this generally helps matters. “I perform dark and arcane acts involving computers; invoking unknown horrors, and meddling with terrible secrets beyond mortal ken” may not be what I say, but I’m pretty sure that’s what people hear.

After lunch, we stopped by a Kroger supermarket on the way back to Aunt Doris and Uncle Bill’s house. Mostly SJ and I wanted to see what was available there (particularly in the way of bread, given Chris’ pickiness), as we knew we’d need to replenish supplies when leaving Davison to head south to the Blue Ridge Parkway, but we also needed to pick up a couple of things for breakfast the next day.

On the way back to the house, Uncle Bill said that he’d show us some of the farm. The farm apparently covers some 10,000 acres, so we thought we’d be covering a fair amount of ground looking at some of the fields and the extent of the farm, especially as we’d be “doing a drive-by” (and there was poor old me without any semi-automatic. Not even a remotely gangstah drive-by!). But no: the main farm buildings, the silos, and the storage areas are all together in one compact area, and that’s where they drove us through. They pointed out several buildings, and explained some things, but we couldn’t really see a great deal from within the car and we didn’t stop, basically going through a loop and heading back to the house.

Once we got back to the house Uncle Bill went out to his workshop to work on some commissions, and Aunt Doris started putting away groceries. A few days before we had left England I had damaged my thicker coat, and it had started leaking feathers (it has goose down stuffing). This hadn’t mattered in Louisiana, but ever since Lafayette, Indiana, I’d been wearing the coat and getting irritated at the feathers escaping. As we had some downtime, I decided that I would break out our little travel sewing kit and repair the seam that had been damaged, so I brought the sewing kit and my coat out to the dining table, as there is a large window and good lighting there, and got to work with a needle and thread. Aunt Doris was shocked and impressed that I could – and quite willingly would – do this, and we spent quite some time talking about the fact that I know how to sew, and will do it, and have no problems with hand-fixing things if needed. Once I’d fixed my coat we left Aunt Doris, who was working on dinner, and SJ suggested that we go for a walk out around the farm.

Uncle Bill had told us that we could just walk around the farm and nobody would bother us. This rather surprised me, as wandering around unaccompanied on an English farm is not something I’d recommend as a hobby. English farmers would certainly enquire about your presence and intentions (probably involving rather cruder language, potentially questioning the interloper’s parentage and species), and may even call the police. As it turned out it didn’t matter anyway: just as we were leaving, Uncle Bill came back to the house and offered to take us over and show us around a bit.

The first place we went to was one of the main maintenance buildings – Uncle Bill wanted to talk to some people there – and while we waited for him we looked around a bit, feeling rather out of place. In the middle of the building was a huge tractor, easily twice as big as any English tractor I had ever seen, that several workers were polishing – yes, polishing – to the point that it gleamed. If it wasn’t for the tyres, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that it was brand new off the production line, not a working tractor! We later found out that the farm owner is strict about making sure that the workers keep the equipment in pristine condition: washed, polished, any damage has to be fixed up, dents and scratches buffed out and repainted. Unusual, but quite sensible – there’s a lot of money in those machines, and treating them right helps make them last.

Not brand new… although you’d be hard-pressed to tell

Next we went over to the main admin building where the farmer’s wife – Aunt Doris and Uncle Bill’s daughter Glenda – was working. When we got there, she was on the phone, so while we were waiting I looked around a bit. The office had a dividing counter with desks, computers, and other accoutrements of bureaucracy on one side; and a mostly clear area on the other side for truckers and farm workers. “Mostly” because they’d built a ramp up to a windowsill, and placed a load of cushions and blankets at the top; a place for one of the dogs to sit and watch the world go by.

After a while Glenda came over and chatted with us, and offered to give us a guided tour of the farm buildings. We gratefully accepted, and she took us through most of them, explaining what they were for, and pointing out a variety of interesting and occasionally amazing things.

Or is it a cross between a centipede and a tractor?

One of the first stops was their relatively newly-built pesticide and fertiliser loading building, set a good way away from any of the others because of the danger of explosion inherent in keeping any large amount of nitrates and phosphates around. The building is lined with pipework and valves that let the workers drive tractors in through one door, load them up with the substance du jour, and then drive out of another door. The next building was a workshop where several pieces of farm machinery were being worked on, including a huge hulking mass that looked like the offspring of a giant green crab and a wire factory (it was a seed planter actually. So a giant green crab/wire factory hybrid that thrusts its seeds into the very Earth.)

SJ gets ready to make off with a tractor.

After eyeing the seed monster, Glenda took us to the largest building on the site: an huge, cavernous place that housed three combine harvesters, three huge tractors, grain hopper trailers, a truck, and more! We were amused to find that the combines where each named after cartoon or film characters – Shrek and Popeye characters – and Uncle Bill had done labels and pictures on each of them. SJ climbed up into the cab of one of the big tractors, each of which had wheels as tall as me, with four tires per axle to help spread their weight, and posed for a photograph. I refrained from attempting the same because I was, frankly, concerned about being clumsy and damaging something. I was happy to just look! But big as the machinery was, there was a lot of space left in the building, which made us even more amazed when Glenda told us that during harvest time they move everything out of the building and use it to supplement the grain silos, filling it almost to the ceiling from end to end with corn kernels!

The big building is big.

The next stop was another storage building, albeit much smaller, that contained more farm machinery, this time including the “Terra-Gator”, a three-wheeled vehicle with tires as big as SJ, with a big hopper on the back that they fill with organic pellet fertiliser: chicken poop! Uncle Bill had made a “What the kluck?” sticker for the back of it that made us chuckle a lot.

What the kluck indeed…	These machines are pretty damned big.
Weird looking contraption, though.	That’s a lot of storage space…

The farm operates a range of services for other farmers, including storage and corn drying in a new drier tower, and Glenda showed us the huge silos (one 70ft, one 60ft, a 40ft, and a 30ft, each a good 40ft across) they have for storing various forms of grains and she was going to show us the trucker’s lounge and laboratory, but they’d just had them repainted and the fumes from the paint were…. well, I could hardly stick my head around the door before my eyes started watering!

Why does a farm need a laboratory? Apparently the price the farm can get for the corn varies drastically based on the moisture content, level of foreign matter, impurities or mould present: getting it even slightly wrong can be the difference between a healthy, profitable harvest and a disaster. The farm has to send samples off for an evaluation that determines the price, but they test it on-site to try to make sure that they get it as good as possible before doing so.

We were just about to head off when Bill (the farmer, Glenda’s husband, not Uncle Bill…) came by and said hello. He was pretty busy, and couldn’t stay long, so after a few brief words he headed off, and we decided we’d head back to Aunt Doris’ to get out of the cold. Glenda told us that she’d probably drop in for a little while later, and headed back to the office as we wandered through the massed silos.

Back at Aunt Doris’ we hung out while she made dinner, eventually joined by Uncle Bill and Aunt Doris’ other daughter Rhonda, and her husband David. It was a good dinner; Aunt Doris is an excellent cook and had made a very tasty spread. David is an avid swimmer, and he talked about wanting to swim the English Channel one day. Unfortunately we had to enlighten him about the fact that it is wider than he thought it was (21 miles at the closest, rather than the 13 he thought it was), and that the Strait of Dover (said 21 mile span) is the busiest shipping channel in the world. He was rather less enthused at the idea after that… Part-way through the meal Glenda dropped by briefly, and for a while I was again under strict orders to talk as now three of SJ’s female relatives wanted to listen to my accent, even though they noticed that it was fairly Americanised now, but “when you keep talking I hear [your accent],” as Rhonda said. Immigration came up, as it inevitably does, but thankfully much sillier things like crazy British traditions (Welly Wanging, Black Pudding Throwing competitions, Cheese Rolling, and so on…) came up as well. We filled the evening with all sorts of talk, and had a great time as the sun set and darkness fell outside.

After dinner had finished, Rhonda and David had left, and dishes were cleared, we sat talking for a while and SJ got some laundry done, but around 10pm SJ decided that she wanted to head to bed, as did Aunt Doris, so we said our goodnights, showered, and got into bed at a vaguely reasonable time.

While lying in bed awaiting sleep, one of the things that struck me the most was the silence. While arranging the visit, Aunt Doris had mentioned that there was a ‘lot of traffic’ on the road, and when then farm is busy there may be, but as I lay there I reflected on the fact that back at home we get more cars going past the house at night in five minutes than I’d noticed or heard go past in hours. The silence was nearly unbroken; I miss it.

We woke early on Sunday, got ourselves breakfast – SJ actually managed to get something from the continental breakfast, while I contented myself with well-travelled cereal – and then went to work trying to identify the issue with the headlights. Now, a sane and sensible person, when looking for the headlight relay would look in the nice and easily accessible fuses and relays box in the engine compartment, right next to the battery. Despite not being a sane and sensible person, that’s where I went to look first anyway.

Guess what? There’s no relay for the headlights in there!

By a forbidden and arcane invocation of the mad demon god that bubbles and blasphemes beyond the walls of time and space, I managed to coax enough signal to consult the internet oracle again. From some rather cryptical and mostly unhelpful comments on Infiniti-owners’ forums, I found that there is actually a Super Secret Special Relay Box for the headlights, buried in the engine compartment on the driver’s side, up against the firewall, next to the throttle control for the cruise control system.

While we tried to track down this mystical box of wonder in the tight confines of the engine compartment, we phoned up SJ’s dad to see if he could help. As it turned out, he has a maintenance manual for the car, so with his help over the phone we managed to locate the black box in question. Between him and more internet searching, we managed to work out what we would need to do to get to the relay box, and it involved taking out several bits and pieces to get to it, including part of the throttle control… at which point my “Yeeeah, nope” alarm goes off. Mine, as well, despite my confidence in working on cars.

We decided that we were quite emphatically not equipped for such shenanigans: we had only an emergency toolkit, a rough outline of what was needed, and several thousand miles of road left to travel that we’d actually like to not have potentially screwed up headlights and cruise control for, so we decided that we needed to take the car to a Firestone (SJ’s car shop chain of choice). Thankfully this was just headlights, the rest of the car worked fine, so we decided to carry on north and, while on the interstate (which generally had better signal…), I would track down Firestone locations that might work along our route.

We started loading the car to head off, after repacking everything in preparation for Car Tetris. In the light of day, we noticed that the window for the hotel room would actually open all the way, and it had no screen, so we were able to load the car by simply passing things through the window rather than dragging everything down and out through the lobby and back up to the car (whenever possible we try to park the car within view of the window when staying in hotels, for peace of mind and to be able to keep an eye on it). We managed to get the car loaded and ready almost as quickly and easily as we could have with external corridors thanks to those windows!

A tank breeding farm near Vienna, IL. Quite a big litter this year.

The plan for the road trip up to this point had been to go north through Illinois and Wisconsin, across the upper peninsula of Michigan, and then down to visit SJ’s relatives in Davison and Lansing. With this in mind the best match I could find for our route was a Firestone in Decatur, south-west of Champaign. So, on we went, through the flat fields of Illinois, through gloriously sunny weather – a drastic change from the previous day! – and made pretty decent time. Just after Effingham we stopped at the Green Creek Rest Area for lunch, dining at a picnic table in the sun. Despite the sun, it was rather windy, and cold with it, especially after the comfortable warmth down in Louisiana only two days earlier. The trees had only just started putting out leaves, while when we’d left the south the flowers were starting to bloom; the difference was pretty amazing really.

At Tuscola we left I-57, turning onto US-36 west. We could have gone north to Champaign, and then southwest to Decatur, but SJ was tired of looking at interstate, and I told her that US-36 “would take us straight there.” When I said that, I had no idea that it would take us straight there: that road was the flattest, straightest road I have ever been on on my life. You could have use the white line as a straightedge. We could have lashed the steering wheel and built a house of cards between us on the console. Straight. Flat.

We were a few miles down the road, making decent time – it was about 2pm around this point – and SJ was hoping to get the car to Firestone that afternoon so they could look at it, when we passed billboard after billboard for tourist attraction. Alas, this one, that one, and that one too, all closed on Sundays. Wait … it actually hit us…

It was Sunday. Firestone was probably closed on Sunday (having checked since then, yes it was).

Worse, it’s Easter Sunday. Firestone was definitely closed on Easter Sunday. It’d totally slipped our minds that it was Easter. Once I’d managed to book the plane tickets avoiding the price gouging of the Easter break as best I could, with our other constraints, Easter just vanished from my awareness – and Chris’ too, it seems. We don’t generally do much for it, but we usually are vaguely aware of it. Oops.

Well, poot. Perhaps even dang (we might, perhaps, have used slightly stronger words that those, dear reader, but I shall refrain from assaulting your delicate sensibilities.) (Anymore than he already has.)

So, we pulled over and tried to decide what to do. We now knew we’d have some layover time waiting for the headlights to be fixed, and arrangements to meet up with SJ’s brother in Michigan had reached the point where changing the day would have been difficult, so we decided to abandon the idea of going over the upper peninsula and instead we would head east through Indiana and then up into Michigan. With this change of plan, SJ turned us around and we headed back through Tuscola, stopping briefly at an IGA supermarket which was remarkably open, and then back onto I-57 north to Champaign.

Up and around Champaign we went, switching to I-74 East, stopped briefly for gas, and then headed east towards Indiana. As we drove, I searched for places with Firestones near hotels with guest laundry, as we were desperately in need of doing laundry at this point. I found what looked like 200 Firestones around Indianapolis (okay, so there’s actually only 23 in Indiana, but literally 65% of those are in Indianapolis), but we generally try to avoid big cities for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that big city traffic – and big city drivers in particular – tend to be insane. The best alternative option I found was a Holiday Inn in the city centre of Lafayette, Indiana: it had a free guest laundry, an indoor pool, a Firestone nearby (3 miles away, in the Tippecanoe Mall), and we worked out that we could get there before nightfall.

We left I-74 at Crawfordsville, racing the setting sun as we switched to US-231 north, straight to Lafayette. We got into Lafayette just after sunset, got checked in, and carted all our stuff into the hotel room – on a luggage cart, this time, and the hotel had an actual elevator! The blissful luxury! The guest laundry was one washer and dryer, but the hotel was almost deserted so both were available to use, and we got one load of laundry going while SJ went to shower. While she was showering she discovered that the drain was mostly blocked and backed up rapidly, and she was in ankle-deep water half way through her shower – even Limited Inn of Arseend Nowhere had showers that worked properly!

We’d checked the menu for the restaurant attached to the hotel, and decided it looked decent so we’d eat there, so on the way down after SJ finished her shower we stopped at the front desk to tell them the shower wasn’t draining. The clerk said he’d get the maintenance man to have a look at it, and then we asked him where the entrance to the restaurant was. “It’s closed for Easter,” he tells us. Great, just what we wanted! We asked him which places might be open nearby, after all we were right in the centre of Lafayette, so there should be something… right? He pulled out a map with restaurants marked on it, and he circled a few on it that he thought would be open on Easter, and we headed out into the distinctly chilly evening to look for somewhere to eat. We’d passed a load of eateries on the way into Lafayette, but it was dark now so we couldn’t drive back to them (it’s only much later that I realised we might have been able to order delivery…), so searching on foot was the only option.

Finding dinner was further complicated by the fact that we’d crossed from central time to eastern time, so it was actually an hour later than we initially thought. Perhaps more places might have been open earlier, but as we wandered around looking for the places marked on the map – thankfully central Lafayette is a simple grid system, so it’s not like it was hard to get around – we found closed eatery after closed eatery. Eventually we found one place open, a restaurant and bar that was incredibly noisy and packed, but by this point I had a splitting headache so we went on to try and find other places. The next two were closed, but across the street there was another open place, another restaurant-bar which we tried out of desperation, but the menu looked like grease rolled in grease and then deep fried in grease, and the noise was incredible. In the end we decided to just go back to the hotel room and eat some of our breakfast and lunch supplies – it might not be hot, but it would be food, and quiet.

When we got back to the room, I started pulling out food and SJ went to check whether the shower worked properly now. It didn’t, as near as we could tell nobody had even come in while we were out, and all the clerk would offer was a room change as the maintenance man had gone. We didn’t want to have to move everything – even though we were trying to travel as light as we could, we still had a lot of stuff and had already unpacked – so we decided to just cope with it for that night, and the clerk told us that he’d send someone up to look at it the next day. As we ate, we decided that when checking into a hotel – any hotel – from now on, we would go over a room before bringing stuff in, checking it over for both cleanliness and to make sure that all the fixtures, fittings, and other contents were clean, worked properly, and generally acceptable to avoid this problem as much as possible in future.

We wanted to get up as early as we could the next day, to get to Firestone when they opened and be first in line to be seen, but I looked up the local sunrise times – as we didn’t want to be driving to Firestone in the dark with dodgy headlights – and found that, while Firestone opened at 7am, sunrise wasn’t until 7:30. So we decided to set the alarm for 6:30am so that we could get breakfast, get ourselves together, and head over for between 7:30 and 8am, and hope to be seen as soon as possible.

After showering in the paddling pool – I mean, the shower – we got into bed about 11:30pm.