We woke entirely too early on Tuesday morning, managed to drag ourselves out of bed, and apply breakfast. By about 8ish we’d finished breakfast, prepared tea and stuff for lunch, and got everything together and ready to go in record time. We loaded everything onto a luggage cart and the family donkey (ie: me) to get everything out to the car in one go.

On the way out we stopped by the front desk. The checkout bill had been slipped under our door overnight – I didn’t remember that happening on any of our previous trips, so I was slightly confused about that at the time (It is a thing that’s supposed to happen at Holiday Inns and Expresses, the idea being that if everything’s right, the guest needn’t stop by the desk but can just leave when they’re ready, leaving the key in the room. Various properties are better or worse about doing it.) – and the requested discount for the problem with the shower was conspicuous by its absence. SJ asked the desk clerk, the same one who had been on the desk the previous day, about this and he said that it was “Just one of those things that happens,” with an attitude that exuded “I don’t give a shit, go away you’re bothering me” (much like he had the previous day, really, only more pronounced this time). SJ’s reaction to that slightly surprised me: she didn’t press the point, or demand to Speak With Management or anything, the clerk confirmed charging the bill to the card and SJ basically walked out. He’s right, that really was uncharacteristic of me – I generally get irate very quickly at poor service anywhere, since there’s never any excuse for it. I didn’t know at the time but she had A Plan… *bwuahahaha!*

We loaded the car in the cold morning sun. Much like the previous day, it was well below freezing, but unlike that day we couldn’t just pile into the car and go: we had to load it with our suitcases, cooler, food bag, electronics bag, various other bits and pieces, the AirPot with its precious cargo (of tea – Chris needs his tea. We’d decided to buy some sort of thermos in the US and leave it in the car, rather than take up space in the luggage with one that wouldn’t be large enough anyway. We didn’t expect to end up with this sort of thing, but we found it that day at Sam’s – the price was decent, the ease of access good, and it holds plenty, so we went for it.), and finally find seats for Teddy and the few other guys we had brought with us for the trip. We were getting a bit better at slotting everything in already, but it still took time, and we were both greatly relieved to finally get to shut the doors and let the heater do its job.

We got on the road a little after 8:20, heading straight east to get onto I-65 North. Along the way we were almost rear-ended by some idiot in a pickup truck who came up behind the car insanely fast, barely missing us. The horn and SJ’s sign language got something of a workout at this point, but he pulled off before long and I slightly released my deathgrip on the dash…

Just before we got to the interstate we spied a Target, and decided that it was worth trying it to see if they had any bread (I am very picky about bread, especially when in the Land of Sweetened Bread Everywhere) and various other supplies. We didn’t know whether it would be open at this point, as it was only just gone 8:30am, but we pulled up to find that it opened at 8! We found good looking bakery bread, water, more of my much-missed Bolthouse Farms Vanilla Chai, some cheese, and some replacements for depleted snacks and fruit.

It was obviously still really cold outside, so SJ wore her thick coat while we went into Target, but she forgot to take it off before we set off again, and she doesn’t like driving in a coat. We stopped at the first rest area we could – Wolcott Rest Area, about 25 miles up the interstate – so she could take off her coat. I guess I’m being more influenced by the UK than I would like to admit in some cases. The SJ of years past would have just pulled over on the shoulder, especially on that empty stretch of highway, taken her coat off, and then gone on, rather than put up with it for 25 miles. In the UK, it’s illegal to stop on the side of a motorway (which is more or less the equivalent of an interstate, except it seems like motorways are always very, very busy, so instead of these mostly empty interstates in the midwest, think of the ones on the eastern seaboard between, say, Washington and Boston) unless your car breaks. In the US, as far as I know, it’s not – it’s not terribly advisable, and state troopers generally move motorists along if they come along and find them parked on the side of an interstate, but it’s not forbidden. Also, when your car does break, there’s another set of differences: in the US, you’ll see people fixing it themselves to get on their way, if they can (changing tires, etc); in the UK, you won’t – but I don’t know if this is because of the setting or because of a general difference in attitude I’ve noticed of Brits being less keen to work on their cars than Americans. If they’re waiting for a tow, in the UK, the rule is always to vacate the car and get as far away from the traffic as possible – climbing over whatever’s in the way – in case a moving vehicle should come along and hit the stationary vehicle. In the US, we generally sit in the car to wait, assuming that the moving vehicles will continue staying in their lanes instead of being pulled towards the parked car as if there’s suddenly some sort of magnetic force. Funny, this is the one case in UK driving where the official assumption is that the moving vehicles won’t stay in their lane – everything else officially espoused about driving here is based entirely on the assumption that everyone is always exactly where they should be, exactly when they should be there.

On the way there, SJ got me to call Six Continents Guest Relations and hand her the phone, “because managers always go nuts when they get a Guest Relations case,” she said with a rather scary smile. I don’t know all the particulars, but I know: (1) they get charged financially for these, and (2) if they get enough of them, they face losing their flag – they’ll have to rebrand, away from the Six Continents collection (Holiday, Crowne Plaza, Intercontinental, etc). Losing a flag is a HUGE deal in Hotel World, though obviously one complaint will only have minimal effect towards that. The financial charge, though – that’s what I had in my mind when I just paid the bill that morning and left. If I can’t get money out of you one way, I’ll get it another. And doing it this way, I’ll cost you more.

SJ has a Priority Club membership with the Intercontinental Group (it’s just the free membership card they always offer you), something that came in very useful at a few points during the journey. When we were checking into the hotel in Lafayette, the forms showed the address and phone number associated with her membership number, and spaces to correct them if they need updating. They were wrong, so SJ had filled in the correct information as we checked in… except that, when she started talking to the guess relations agent, and he was going through checking her membership information, it turned out that despite having two (very quiet and slow) days to fix the problems, the clerks at the Holiday Inn had done nothing, and her old, incorrect information was still showing on her account! The agent fixed that, and went over the problem we’d had with the hotel and the way they’d handled it, although SJ initially didn’t mention the attitude the clerks had shown. The problem she stressed was the fact that housekeeping should have easily spotted the problem with the shower drain, and either got maintenance to fix it at that point, or the room should not have been rented until it was fixed, especially on a slow night like the Easter night we got there (when the vast majority of the hotel looked empty). Even if housekeeping hadn’t noticed the problem, once it was reported it should have been fixed, or we should have been told there and then that it couldn’t have been: we shouldn’t have been basically lied to about maintenance being involved.

All SJ was after with the complaint was making the hotel go all flaily over being hit with a guest relations case, but the agent said he could give her 4,000 priority club points ((club points can be redeemed for free nights, with 10,000 to 50,000 needed depending on the property. 4,000 is 2/5ths of a free night at a Holiday Inn Express)) as compensation for the aggravation and poor service. He was working away typing, when SJ off-handedly noted that it was the attitude they’d had that annoyed her the most, especially given that she’s worked as a Holiday Inn desk clerk. “You know what, we’ll make it five thousand,” he said. Worked for me! I would’ve been happy if the hotel had given me 10% off the rate – they’d charged me rack rate (full price), after all, so they had plenty of wiggle room. Fifty percent off? That’ll work even better.

Shortly before SJ finished talking to guest relations we pulled into the rest area. We stretched our legs a bit, SJ took off her coat, and we got sorted to head on northwards again. The whole stretch of road around the rest area, and quite some distance away from it, was dotted with wind turbines – Indiana seems to have several areas of substantial wind farming, in addition to normal arable farming!

Wind spinny things!

More spinny things, and apparently they want your pets to play on the highway…

North we drove, and ran into all sorts of confusion with Time, or more specifically the fact that, while most of Indiana is now in Eastern Time (although it apparently used to be all in Central Time, years ago…), as you get towards north Indiana and the suburbs of Chicago you find yourself back in Central Time because they want to keep Gary, Indiana and the other suburbs of Chicago in the same timezone as Chicago itself. Which makes sense, I suppose, but does hilarious things when your phone is syncing its time off the local network and you suddenly find it’s an hour earlier than you thought it was, or perhaps not!

Near Gary, Indiana we switched from I-65 North to I-94 East. Except that for a stretch there it’s also I-80 East. Oh, and US-6, too. Have I mentioned that the US road system hates me and wants to drive me mad? What looked on the map like a horrible mess of an interchange actually proved to be relatively simple (it looking a horrible mess wasn’t helped by the scale he was dealing with – looking at either the Rand McNally or the phone didn’t really let him see it as well as you can above), and soon after that I-80 somehow buggered off to pretend that it was the I-90 (because roads of madness) and left us alone on I-94 (and possibly US-6, I’m not entirely sure). It was not the last we would hear of the itinerant I-80, but we will come to that later…. down the road, as you might say.

That slippery slope!

I-94 took us through Portage and Chesterton, past the confusingly named Michigan City, Indiana (maybe it used to be in Michigan, but slid down the side of the lake? Or perhaps it is some kind of subtle insult by Indiana to its more northerly neighbour?), and then soon after we passed the state line into Michigan. The welcome centre on I-94 East is the New Buffalo Welcome Center ((New Buffalo Welcome Center was apparently the first ever interstate welcome centre in the USA. They don’t actually make much of that – I can’t remember seeing anything about it there.)), and the first thing we noticed upon pulling into the parking lot there (via a very strange road setup) was the lighthouse right there by the picnic area. Not, apparently, a real lighthouse – the beacon is a relatively low brightness, simple, constant light, rather than a bright rotating beam or flashing light – but it looks really neat and was a suitable introduction to the state that prides itself on having the most operational lighthouses of any US state.

A rather chilly SJ for scale.

We went into the welcome centre itself, and while I visited the little programmer’s room, SJ was looking around the various brochures and guides available. When I found her she had accumulated quite a stack, and I asked her how many weeks we were going to be spending in Michigan… for which I got a completely unwarranted tickling!

A small library of touristy literature accumulated, we adjourned to the car and decided that it was time for lunch. We pulled out the cooler and lunch supplies and went to sit at one of the picnic tables. The sun was shining and was actually not too cold now… except that the wind was blowing steadily, and was icy cold and penetrating. While SJ sensibly wore her gloves, I had no truck with such rational behaviour, and we watched my fingers turn an interesting shade of blue as we ate. But at least we didn’t need to worry about refrigerating the cheese!

Around 12:15 we finished our rather hurried lunch, packed everything away, and headed off again along I-94, passing north of another Decatur (with another similarly insanely straight-looking road leading to it…), and past Kalamazoo and Battle Creek before turning onto I-69 North near Marshall to head for Lansing.

At Lansing, we headed towards one of the outlying towns to visit SJ’s brother Robb, his wife, and their children (still carrying the colouring books we’d been asked to deliver by SJ’s parents, too!) We’d originally hoped to get there by 1pm, but it was actually closer to 2:45pm. We’re still not quite sure how it ended up being so much later; some of the difference could be chalked up to rest areas, but I actually suspect that we went through some kind of time warp in north Indiana as a result of the crazy shenanigans with the timezones there.

Us with the kiddos; photo thanks to my sister-in-law Alyssa.

We were greeted by Robb, Alyssa, and their children. Logan, Isaiah, and our only neice, Addy – they were 8, 5, and 3 months old. I hadn’t seen Logan since he was a babe in arms, and I’d never met the other two; Chris had never met any of them. The boys even recognised us, and knew that we were their aunt and uncle – Isaiah asked how long we’d traveled to come see him, and was incredibly touched when we told him that we’d spent one day flying, and four days driving. We visited for several hours, were impressed with how mature, intelligent, and friendly the children were, and caught up on what had been going on in each others’ lives. Robb showed us the office and the furniture he had built for it (I think he built everything but the chairs!), and some of his tools and toys (including his gigantic and rather vicious-looking snow blower, which apparently got a good workout this past winter!) while Alyssa made dinner for us. Dinner was fabulous, naturally; Alyssa’s a stellar cook.

Photo thanks to my brother Robb.

I had no idea Robb was talented with building things that way – the furniture was brilliant, with lots of well-thought-out touches added that really enhanced usability. He made the trolley above, for example: drawers on both sides, an array of sizes, for holding bits to repair computers. A slide out shelf at the bottom to put a tower, and the whole thing slides under the desk to keep the top clear (well, it was when we visited, anyway), so that if a friend came over with a computer to fix, Robb didn’t suddenly have to clear some desk space to work on it. Another one he made, which I can’t remember so well how it exactly worked, was a drawer that would take another piece of wood that slotted perfectly on top to create more (temporary) desk space when you needed it. The drawer would actually take the pressure of being used as a desk, unlike so many drawers I’ve used in my life that barely take the pressure of being used as a drawer! I blame him for my over-engineered banner I came up with a few months later. 😉

We delivered the colouring books to the nephews, and spent some more time after dinner chatting before we had to set off again at 7pm to head to Aunt Doris’. The visit went really well, and we were sorry to have to go after arriving so much later than we wanted, but we talked about hopefully visiting again later in our time in Michigan, and bade them farewell for the evening.

SJ’s Aunt Doris lives out in the countryside on the far side of Flint, and we were getting quite low on gas, so we stopped to refuel on the way before heading off to look for Aunt Doris’ house. By this point it was after 8:20pm, the sun had set, but thankfully the headlights were working and we got onto the correct road without any problems (they have very helpfully illuminated intersection signs in this part of Michigan. We decided they are a wonderful idea and should be used more widely.) and headed off down it trying to work out where her house was. We eventually got to where we thought it was, but between the fact that neither of us had ever been there, it was dark, the mailboxes were all on one side of the road, and house numbers were hard to see, we found that we were actually on the wrong side of the street. I’d pulled into the long, skinny (my car’s width plus about 2 inches either side) driveway, and stopped a bit of a distance from the house. I saw someone outside sweeping, so I hopped out to ask if I was in the right place. He pointed me across the street, so I got back in and had to reverse out that long, skinny drive – probably about 4 car lengths. Fun! At least we nearly got it right first time, anyway!

Reversing and pulling into the correct drive, we saw Aunt Doris coming out of the house to greet us. Unfortunately, just as SJ got out of the car, she put her foot on the edge of the driveway wrong and slipped and fell! Thankfully, SJ is an expert faller, and she was unhurt (the trick for me is to just let the fall happen – I always sprain my ankle, etc, when I try to catch myself. The damage done from falling is usually negligible – the damage done from trying to catch myself can last months, though. At least this works while I’m young!), but Aunt Doris was very concerned and exclaimed, “Oh, don’t fall, don’t fall! Come over into the porch light and you’ll see why.” It turned out that a few days before, Aunt Doris had slipped and fallen in the house at night, and had cut a big gash on the end of her chin. Her husband Bill later told us that he thought it should have had stitches, but she hadn’t had any. It’d managed to scab over on its own, though.

We left everything in the car, and went in to visit with Aunt Doris and Uncle Bill for a while. They asked us lots of questions – how we met (we told them the long version), what we do, how the trip had gone so far – and much of it was directed at a certain Englishman because Aunt Doris wanted to listen to my accent (this was something of a constant during the Michigan leg of the trip, with various female kin of SJ’s wanting to hear me talk…) Somewhere between 9:30pm and 10pm, Aunt Doris and Uncle Bill went to bed, and we started to unload the car into the guest room we’d be in for the next three nights.

We unpacked just what we needed, showered, and got ready for bed. Aunt Doris had told us that she usually gets up at 4:30am or 5am, to which both SJ and I made less than enthusiastic faces. Even though she assured us that we didn’t have to get up then, we did set the alarm for 7am so we’d be up earlier rather than later, and SJ prefers to try to sync our schedule closer to our host’s if possible (SJ originally asked for 6:30am, but we were entirely too tired for that). And we collapsed into exhaustion again – amazing how tiring it is just sitting — in a smooth-riding car!

We woke on Monday morning with near-darkness outside the hotel, the barest suggestion of light on the horizon. As we ate breakfast, dressed ourselves, and prepared for the day ahead, the light grew outside. Looking out of the hotel window, I saw some bits of snow I hadn’t remembered seeing the day before – it looked like it might have snowed a bit overnight, which was vaguely concerning for our continued northerly journey, but it was only small patches. When we left at just about 7:30, for the 3 mile trip to Firestone over by the Tippecanoe Mall, it was more or less fully daylight; enough that we didn’t need headlights at least.

Arriving at Firestone we were greeted by an entirely too cheerful and awake worker called Bill, who tried to look up SJ in the Firestone system as she’d been to a Firestone before. They apparently key their records off phone number (which, I suppose, is better than the social security number used in so many other places), but SJ’s old mobile phone number had no information associated with it, and while they had three different records for her on her parents’ phone number – with a variety of different spellings – none of them had her Infiniti attached to them! SJ sent me out to the car to retrieve paperwork, as she remembered having a Firestone receipt in there, and on producing it we found out the correct number to use for her account was actually the phone number she had back in 2008 while staying in her apartment by LSUS. After that, Bill spent several minutes fixing the mess so that SJ’s name was correctly spelt and associated with the correct phone number, and there was only one of her in the system.

Then we came to explaining the problem with the car, giving its symptoms, the things we’d checked and that we’d ruled out the bulbs and the fuses and all we had left to check were the relays, and we weren’t equipped to do it – unless he could think of anything else. “Well, squirrels could have chewed the wires,” he said cheerfully. We were still deeply hoping that it wouldn’t be a wiring though, as that’d be a hilarious problem to fix…. but there are a lot of squirrels near where the car was being kept.

We handed over the keys, and went to sit in the waiting area, warm sun streaming through the large windows onto us. Bill went around setting things up for the day, turning on the TV in the waiting area, starting some coffee brewing. He offered some to us, but we both declined, and then he suggested a cup of tea, with milk and sugar, “like the English like.” We ended up having a fairly lengthy conversation with him about tea: it turns out he had a sort of surrogate grandmother when he was a kid. She was Swedish, and he’d spent a fair amount of time with her, and she used to make hot tea with milk and sugar and he fell in love with tea made that way. Bill also told SJ that he was shocked to learn that she came from Louisiana – we hadn’t told him the long story of the various places SJ grew up in – and that he thought she didn’t sound entirely American.

After a while Bill came over and told us that they’d brought the car in, reproduced the problem, and they were trying to find the relays for the headlights. “I can show them where the relays are,” SJ told him. “Oh, you can? Really?” he replied with some surprise, “okay, well, just go over there and tell those guys working on your car!” At this point we both went out into the garage to find three (yes, three) mechanics poking at the car, hood open, one looking at the fuse panel by the steering column, and the others looking at the easily-accessible fuses and relays box in the engine compartment, all with puzzled looks on their faces.

Striding towards them SJ threw back her shoulders, puffed out her chest, and loudly announced, “My headlight relays are,” pointing out the itinerant black box buried in its inconvenient location, “over here, in this box.” Despite their surprised looks, the mechanics gratefully accepted the information and said they’d get to work taking it out and testing it, so SJ and I returned to the waiting area. Damn, that felt good. It’s one of my favorite memories of the whole trip!

It didn’t take long to get the news that they’d pulled the relay, tested it, and concluded that it was indeed broken. Bill started calling people to try and track down a replacement part for it, and eventually called us over to tell us the news: he’d found a replacement, at an Infiniti dealer in Indianapolis who was willing to drive it up to Lafayette that day. Given that we’d explicitly avoided going to Indianapolis, we felt a little silly at this point, but even with the benefit of hindsight I think we’d still do the same thing again: the paddling pool shower and unhelpful clerks aside, our time in Lafayette was relaxed, filled with friendly people, and generally a good time. But, anyway, we told Bill to tell them to go ahead and bring it up – and we would try not to think too hard about how much our choice of city would end up costing. They said it’d be at the Firestone by 4pm, and in the car shortly after, so we gave Bill our current phone number in case they needed to get hold of us, and then phoned for a cab to take us back to the hotel. He told us that, as we were right next to a mall, there was a Barnes&Noble and a bunch of other places we could go, but as we told him: the hotel had a pool, and we intended to use it!

The cab company we phoned said that someone would be there for us in about 20 minutes. They lied, like lying things made entirely of lies and misinformation. SJ and I sat in the waiting area for a while, and an old lady who had brought her car in for an oil change was sat there doing some knitting. At one point she asked if there was anything she could do to help us, as her car would be done soon. Both SJ and I found very touching and generous, but we thanked her and said that no, we were just waiting on a taxi.

And we waited, and waited.

Two more phone calls, and an hour after the first call, the taxi finally arrived. Given that the hotel was only 2.9 miles from the Firestone we could probably have already walked back by that point, save for the lack of sidewalks along a chunk of the route, and the fact that it was still really cold outside; not the emphatically below-freezing cold it was when we brushed ice off the car before we left the hotel, but damned cold. The cabbie himself was actually a decent guy, and ended up earning a tip even though we were pissed when he first turned up. Among other things, he told us of a time he was stopped by a policeman for having a headlight out, during the day (the car had daylight running lights). The cop was actually going to ticket him until the cabbie pointed out that he was grateful the cop had told him the light was out, and he’d get it fixed, but all these other people were driving past without any lights on at all, what with it being daylight… “Yeah, I hadn’t really thought about that,” the cop apparently said. We concluded he must have needed more doughnuts.

We paid the cab driver, and got the details from him for arranging a timed pickup later to get us back to Firestone. At this point we checked at the desk about the shower, and were told – with some attitude – that it hadn’t been fixed, and all they could do was give us another room. At this point we decided we’d put up with that for a working shower, as we’d be there another night and didn’t want to have to go paddling again! It was only now that the clerk told us the alternative room was the adjoining one! If they’d told us that the night before, I think we probably would have moved then, but nothing so helpful. So we asked for a discount for the first night for the problem with the shower (this being standard practice in US hotels when the room isn’t up to snuff, particularly Six Continents hotels, which is a thing you know when you’ve been on that side of the desk for nearly a decade) – the clerk said he’d have to clear that with his boss – and got the second room key, went back to the room and opened the doors between the two adjoining rooms so that we could transfer our stuff between them more easily.

It was a really strange experience, as the rooms were almost identical, mirrored across the adjoining wall, made even more freaky by the fact that there were mirrors set into closet doors on opposite sides of the adjoining door, so we could see a mirrored, mirror copy of the room without our stuff in it at the same time as the room with our stuff in!

After moving everything through we set up the taxi pickup, and had some lunch as we were both hungry by this point. We also decided that, as Bill had been so very helpful and friendly, we’d bring him some of our tea as we had a bit more than we strictly needed for the whole trip. So we packed some of the precious bags into ziplock bags to bring with us as we prepared lunch. After we’d eaten and sorted laundry we got changed to go swimming, and SJ got more laundry going while we swam. The pool itself was on the second floor, not very large – perhaps only 15×20 feet, going from 3 feet to 4.6 feet deep – but it was big enough to swim circuits and mess around in (neither SJ or I are Serious Swimming is Serious Business swimmers, and prefer to enjoy relaxing and having fun rather than swimming precision ruler-straight lengths). The room the pool was in had wide windows along two sides and a skylight; it was a strange experience to float in the pool, watching clouds go over, with so much sunlight coming in; a stark contrast to the environment of Glossop Swimming Pool! That place is Victorian, so it has high ceilings. It’s two very tall stories, with a viewing balcony – instead of using that only when they have races for the swim club, they leave it accessible all the time, so there are always perverts watching you swim. It has large windows, but somehow stays mostly dark even on the sunniest days. Even better, we had to pool to ourselves, and we spent over an hour in there, broken occasionally when SJ went to tend to laundry.

Eventually SJ began to feel a bit sinus-headachy, so we went back to the room and SJ had some food, painkillers, and sudafed, and then a nap. I went to shower, had a snack, and generally just poked at email and relaxed for a while. We’d set the taxi pickup for 5pm, so eventually I woke SJ and we got ready to head down to the lobby for 5. Although we were actually a little early, I had a vague feeling that we should hurry a bit, although I couldn’t put my finger on why. When we got down to the lobby the taxi was waiting outside, the driver said he’d gotten there a little early and didn’t expect us to be down yet, but he was ready and we piled in to head back up to Firestone.

The cab driver this time was called Hutch, and he had a big, bright pink monkey called Starsky hanging from the rearview mirror. He said that, when people found out his name, they kept on asking him where Starsky was, so he got the monkey. He told us that it’s a good conversation starter, and it makes it easier for drunk people, or those without good memories, so they can ask the cab company to “send the guy with the monkey.” He tells children that the monkey has no name, and they should try to think of one, to keep them quieter too!

And then SJ and the driver started making fun of me about music.

SJ likes to listen to music as background in the car: it doesn’t have to be loud, but not having any music playing makes her feel extremely uncomfortable. Indeed, I prefer background music to be rather quiet – I’ve surprised no end of friends who didn’t even realize the radio was on until I said something like, “This is a good song!” and turned it up a bit. Loud music physically hurts, and yet I seem to run across only loud or no music these days, as though all the volume knobs in the world are broken. I’m convinced most of the world is dealing with some amount of hearing loss, and it makes me wonder how many misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and even wars are down to people not hearing properly what was said. The CD player and radio in the car has been broken for some time, and we haven’t had time to investigate what is wrong with it and how hard it’d be to fix, so I had put some music on my phone to play in the car. This worked, somewhat, except that I only put 40 tracks on it (in my vague defence, I don’t have any extra storage in my phone, so I was somewhat restricted by the space available) and tracks were repeating too frequently. Top 40 only – reminded me why I don’t listen to radio anymore! Thankfully I’d brought SJ’s entire 40GB music collection on the laptop, so the first night of the trip when we were in Grenada SJ put a load of it on her phone and we used that for music. But I was made fun of for it anyway.

When we got to Firestone we saw the car sat in the workshop, headlights on and steady. It looked like they were still working on it a bit, so we asked about it and asked where Bill was. Apparently he’d finished for the day already, and he wasn’t there, so we left the tea with the worker manning the desk (much to his confusion, until we explained it to him) for it to be passed to Bill later. He told us that they’d replaced the relay, were just doing a few final checks, and then the car would be ready. Shortly after, the mechanics drove the car out to the parking lot, and we forked over an arm and a leg to pay for the repair before driving the car back down to the hotel. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t take the limbs from the sacrificial goat this time. Persnickety mechanics. We had to use our own. 😉

By this point it was getting towards dinnertime, so we pulled out the map of restaurants we’d been given the night before, and decided to try one of the places that’d been closed then. It being Monday night instead of Easter Sunday night, we were hopeful. We worked out a vague loop covering some of the restaurants and set out to look for one that looked good.

This building (the courthouse, I think) in the center of downtown Lafayette is very pretty.

First on our list of places to look at was a Mediterranean restaurant called Adelino’s Old World Kitchen, and after finally working out how to get in – the entryway looked like it was actually the way into a lawyer’s office, and very poorly signposted – we were asked whether we wanted to be seated in the front (in the bar area, basically), or farther back in the restaurant. Remembering how loud bars could get, we decided to sit towards the back, and we were led to a table over in a quiet corner area. The décor was nicely done, with lots of dark wood, Mediterranean-style bottles, urns, candles, and trailing vines arranged in tasteful patterns approved of by the Terrible Restaurant Gods, and a remarkable gold ceiling that we decided was probably not golf leaf, unless we were inadvertently dining in the local Mafia headquarters.

Our waiter was fabulous; he spent some time going through the menu without rushing or impatience, explaining the various dishes and the tapas-style part of the menu found between the appetisers and entrées. We ended up ordering several tapas dishes, a salad, and an entrée, and split the food between us, and it worked out to pretty much exactly the right amount for us in the end. The food was tasty, and overall we were very pleased – although looking at reviews of the restaurant since, it seems like we actually got pretty lucky, as they seem to have a mix of really good and really bad reviews.

After dinner, we headed back to the hotel and went back to the room with the plan to get everything prepared so that we could load up the car and leave as early as possible the next day. We had to get from Lafayette, Indiana to Lansing, Michigan as early as we could, as SJ’s brother Robb had arranged to take the day off work to meet up with us, and we were due to get to SJ’s Aunt Doris’ house near Flint, Michigan in the evening – we had a lot of ground to cover, and not much wiggle room.

So, we packed up as much as we could, ironed everything we needed to get ironed, and prepared everything for a speedy getaway. We had everything pretty much sorted by 8pm, and planned to head to bed around 10 to be up at 6:30am. We were about to go swimming again when the hotel’s wifi – which had been conspicuously broken so far – started working, and SJ wanted to catch up money, contact various people through Farcebook and so on. By the time she was done, it was getting late and we were tired, so no swimming – we just showered and slept. This grownup thing is overrated sometimes.

Now we actually get to normally numbered days: Friday was scheduled to be the first day of the road trip! However, the first chunk of the day wasn’t actually spent on the road; it was spent doing yet more sorting. I’ll spare you the details. I never knew we could have that much to sort out and resort, but we did. All the while, Nannie was trying to clean the house around us, as SJ’s brother would be coming to stay that night, and she had to get things ready for him! Things got a little bit frantic, but we left around noon. Nannie had asked SJ which way we’d be going, and where we were aiming for while we were getting things together. SJ told her, “North!” We hadn’t actually decided on that yet, or even looked at the map yet, and we think this horrified Nannie a bit…

That’s not strictly true. I had looked extensively at the map in planning the trip before we left; I had to decide where we could get to, where we couldn’t, and which order we’d go in. I’d arranged to stay with various relatives along the way, with tentative dates for each of them. The path, of course, was circular. When it came to the nitty gritty details of each day’s path, though, you have to understand that part of my joy at roadtripping is NOT having a fixed, firm schedule. After dealing with English public transport for a solid three-year chunk, part of why I NEEDED this road trip was the freedom to be able to just stop if we found something that looked interesting – the freedom to go and stop and go again at will, rather than dictated by a timetable that isn’t followed anyway. So, while the highlights were planned already, the in between wasn’t. On this first chunk, our first planned stop was in Michigan, 1100 miles away, so we had a bit of flexibility in how we got there.

However, even after leaving Nannie’s, we still weren’t On The Road proper: we had a number of stops to make around Bossier City before we could leave, including SJ’s parent’s house. SJ’s dad was waiting for the new waste bag for their riding lawnmower when we called by, to be delivered by a guy in an 18-wheeler. I remember that sort of thing from when my lathe was delivered: it’s a very strange experience to see this big truck pull up and a guy checking that you’re waiting on a delivery.

We also headed to Target (now that it was actually open). Now that we had a better idea of the things we needed for the trip, SJ went around picking up those things while I went and hunted for jeans. I apparently earned myself Good Husband points by actually trying them on there (in the fitting rooms, I hasten note, not in the middle of the store), and when one pair didn’t fit I even went and found a different pair and tried those on too! There were several other errands, including extending the Junk Food Tour of America with Arby’s and an Icee for me. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but I will say I still miss white cherry Icees, and Arby’s was actually surprisingly decent – less greasy than I remember.

Image by Steve Snodgrass.

The last stop we had to make was for doughnuts. We had been trying to get to Southern Maid, the makers of the most tasty doughnuts in the entire world, and the well-deserved recipients of the only commercial endorsement Elvis Presley ever made in his life, but we had consistently failed to get out early enough on the previous days to get to the Southern Maid near Nannie’s in time to get any. We remembered that there was one on East Texas Street, and that one had been open later the last time we had been in the US, so we decided to try it just in case.

Thankfully, they were still there, and still open. Not only were they still open, they had doughnuts too! We bought a variety to last us a couple of days – although a couple of them didn’t last very long at all for some reason. Outside Southern Maid, surrounded by the delicious smell of awesome doughnuts, we pulled out the maps and decided where we wanted to try and get to that day, eventually settling on aiming for Memphis, Tennessee following I-220 East to I-20 East, and then I-55 North.

Day mileage: 340
Southern Maid Donuts, 4701 E Texas St, Bossier City, LA 71111 to Super 8 Grenada, 1451 Sunset Dr, Grenada, MS 38901 via Shoney’s Restaurant, 1526 Sunset Dr, Grenada, MS 38901

And then, finally, around 2:30pm we got on the road!

Ever since we’d washed the car the day before, we’d started to hear a high-pitched whine when the car was moving at speed. I’d tried to work out what was causing it, but it was over on the driver’s side and I couldn’t really root around to work out what was going on. It was pretty easy to ignore at city driving speeds, but when driving at highway speeds it grew into a loud, high-pitched whine akin to the collected, extended caterwauling of an entire girl’s school of petulant, spoilt teenagers being fed feet-first through a woodchipper. Somehow SJ managed to block it out, but it slowly began to drive me ever so slightly unhinged. I should imagine the girls would be considerably louder, dear. Also, you left out the “more” in your last clause. 😉

Our route east along I-20 took us south of El Dorado, Arkansas. SJ has an old acquaintance there, and was considering diverting north to visit her. We eventually managed to contact her son, and he told SJ that his mother was actually over in Dallas visiting a relative, and would be there the entire time we were in the US, so we wouldn’t be able to meet her in El Dorado. The northward detour no longer being needed, we continued along I-20 and tried to get hold of SJ’s brother in Memphis to try to arrange visiting him. This proved to be more than a little tricky: he had only fairly recently moved to Memphis, so we had no phone number for him, I sent him an email (that data connection was starting to be useful already…) but had no expectation of a quick response, and then SJ suggested that I try to contact his wife through Facebook. Now, I Don’t Do Facebook, but under the circumstances I agreed that it was probably necessary – unfortunately, trying to log into SJ’s account from the phone tripped security measures, and we were unable to get past them (in no small part because they didn’t work properly).

So, we decided to shoot for Memphis anyway, passing through Monroe, into Mississippi and through Vicksburg and then around Jackson on the loop (also called I-220. At this point I should have started to suspect that the US road system had it in for me) before joining I-55 north.

As we approached Canton, Mississippi we drove past the absolutely immense Nissan plant. I can honestly say that, until that point, I had never seen a single building that big, it just seemed to keep going and going as we drove past. Measuring it on the map now, it comes out at over 1.63km (1 mile) of continuous factory!

Image by Brad Montgomery.

On we drove into the evening, north past places with names like Pickins (one of the many names I enjoyed saying in quite silly tones during the journey…), and past Holmes County State Park (we never found a corresponding Watson County; we were most disappointed!). Soon after we passed Winona we started to get really hungry, and as we approached Grenada, SJ saw a sign for Shoney’s. “Shoney’s! We have to stop at Shoney’s!” SJ exclaimed, practically bouncing in the seat. “It’ll probably be foul, but it’s a nostalgia thing, you’ll just have to go with it.” I sat there kinda going “Bwuh?! Well, you’re driving!” so we pulled off the interstate at Grenada and passed a variety of hotels before spotting the Shoney’s sandwiched between a Holiday Inn Express and a Wendy’s.

SJ warned me that Shoney’s would have a menu and a buffet. We checked out the buffet, and then the menu, and decided to go with the menu (neither of us are great fans of buffet restaurants): SJ had a salad, and Philly Cheesesteak sandwich she didn’t have to cook for a change, and I decided to try a Turkey Club. The server was helpful, cheerful, and competent, and the food was tasty. After a few minutes I looked up from my food and had to exclaim, “Wait, there was a sandwich on that plate, I saw it!” SJ must have been really hungry to have inhaled it that quickly! Our original plan was to share main dishes at restaurants (having gotten used to the smaller portions served everywhere outside the US), but in the end this only happened on a few occasions – and if we’d tried it that night there just wouldn’t have been enough food, we were that hungry.

We finished eating at around 9pm, and we were both tired and wanted to stop. We hadn’t gone as far as we wanted, but we’d covered over 320 miles, and even though we were still 100 miles south of Memphis, we decided we’d gone far enough, we should just get a room and head to bed. We didn’t want to spend too much, so we started with the Super 8 Motel just across the road from the Shoney’s (once we managed to get across to it, which was surprisingly difficult even at that time of day). The lobby was nice, the clerk was efficient, competent, and friendly, the price of the room was good, so we decided to stay there rather than traipse around the other properties in the area. She told us that our room was “three doors past the pool,” but when we asked her when the pool was open she replied with, “May.” So alas, no chance of getting any swimming in before we left in the morning.

We were in a ground floor room, and the motel had exterior corridors, so it was easy to get stuff into our room. The room was clean, decent, and surprisingly spacious, and we managed to get ourselves settled in quite quickly. Unfortunately, the wifi refused to work correctly, and at this point SJ really needed to sort out our money. Thankfully I was able to tether the laptop to the phone, and she used the data plan on the phone to get to the internet. It worked very well, and SJ managed to get everything sorted, but shortly after she was done I noticed my phone behaving oddly: sending data unexpectedly, turning on the GPS, and generally acting odd. I eventually worked out that Prey (an anti-theft app) had decided that my phone had been stolen and had gone into active reporting mode, but trying to fix that was hilarious over a rather pedestrian connection, especially as the Prey website is as slow as molasses going downhill in a Candian winter at the best of times! I eventually fixed it as SJ finished showering, and explained to her why I had been feverishly working away and stressed. Next it was my turn to shower, and we collapsed into bed around midnight.

The data connection on the phone was SO SLOW compared to what we’re used to. We determined in the end that the US simply has slower connection speeds than Europe. I feel I should clarify: we each have a smart phone, but we opted to just get the Red Pocket plan on one phone and share it for the duration of the trip. We decided to use the other phone for audio logs, playing music (my car radio doesn’t work, and being in a car without soft music on is absolutely torturous to me), etc. Since my phone had the 16GB microSD card, mine became the music & audio storage. Sharing phones was a bit trying at times, but we managed.

Thursday was primarily Car Day. We set to work on going over Iolana to prepare her for the road trip. The first thing we concentrated on was the headlight problem we’d experienced the previous night, and at the time we thought we’d solved it! The headlight bulbs and their wiring harnesses push and twist into the headlight assembly, and they had worked loose so that the headlight bulbs were no longer firmly held in place. We came to the conclusion that the problem we had been having the night before was caused by the bulbs falling back into the engine compartment, and then back into the headlight assembly as a normal result of acceleration and getting bumped around by the road surface. This may well indeed have been part of the problem (it was not, as we later found out, the fundamental issue. But we’ll get to that later, dear reader), and it was a really easy thing to fix.

On the other hand, while checking the headlights, we found that the passenger side parking light wasn’t working at all. There were no fuses we could find to check for that, so we decided we had to get to the bulb to check whether it had blown, and that proved easier said than done. The owner’s manual contained information on getting to the headlights… but nothing about how to get to the parking light bulbs, so I had to consult the Great Internet Oracle to find out what to do. I determined that we needed to unscrew a couple of screws on top of the headlight assembly, and pull the entire assembly out to get to it. Sounds nice and easy!

What the Great Internet Oracle didn’t tell us was that the headlight assembly is held in at the bottom by a very stiff and awkward friction pin that defiantly holds on for dear life, so getting the assembly out requires a lot of cursing and pulling before it deigns to release its death-grip on the car. Thankfully, after all the effort to get to the bulb, we found that it had indeed blown: an easy thing to fix! After replacing bits so that the car didn’t look like a complete mess, we headed to the auto parts shop to get replacement bulbs, spare fuses just in case, and some of that most important of substances: WD40. I was shocked when I realized I didn’t have any in with the car supplies in the trunk; we had to fix that post-haste.

We ended up in conversation with the cashier, and he told us he was a Fugitive From The Law in the UK: he had visited England, and failed to pay the congestion charge while driving in London. What started out as an £8 charge had, by the time they found him and demanded payment, ballooned into over £500 of charges and fines. He’s been told not to bother paying it, and not to go back to the UK… I do wonder how much has been added to the fines since then!

We got the bulb replaced quickly and easily once we got back to Nannie’s – the headlight assembly was much easier to get out and put back when we knew the trick – and then we tidied and emptied the car so that we could go over to a nearby self-service carwash.

On the way to the carwash, we stopped for lunch at one of SJ’s favourite Asian places, a take-out called Mayflower that happens to have a few tables for people who want to just eat there. It’s unpretentious, definitely not fancy, but their food is tasty, and the staff is friendly and welcoming. We split a lunch of egg drop soup (which is impossible to find in the UK), spring roll, and lo mein. I wasn’t impressed by the soup, but the rest was great, and it was a welcome break from running around at this point.

I miss Mayflower, and American Chinese food in general. It’s different from British Chinese food – Chris recently learned that it’s because the Chinese who settled here in Britain mostly came from Hong Kong, whereas the Chinese who settled in America mostly came from mainland China, and those two cuisines are different. They each were adjusted to suit American vs British palates, of course, further adding to the disparity. The bog-standard soup in American Chinese is egg drop, whereas it’s chicken and sweetcorn in British Chinese. I like both, so I miss egg drop soup. Thankfully, it’s very simple to make, so we make it at home. American Chinese lo mein dishes are another thing I sorely miss – and, though we’ve found lo mein noodles, I’ve yet to manage make it taste right.

At the carwash, we began feeding a quarters (in a quantity I don’t even want to think about) (it was less than $10; I got a roll of quarters from the bank specifically for this. Rolls of coins – another thing I miss.) into the wash and vacuum systems so we could give Iolana a pretty thorough cleaning, inside and out. They’d changed the setup since we were last there, replacing the half-useless “vacuum and perfume” system with a proper “vacuum and carpet cleaner” option, and SJ and I worked in tandem passing the hose around as quickly as we could to get the most out of our quarters. It wasn’t a perfect job – when racing the timer on the car wash equipment, you can’t really do as good a job as doing it by hand at home – but it was decent enough, and a vast improvement on the grimy condition the poor car had been in.

Returning to Nannie’s, we finished the detailing: Armor All, treating the leather, hand-cleaning the inside fittings, cleaning windows and mirrors properly, and so on. (Yes, I’m very particular about my car, why do you ask?) We were going out for dinner with friends later, but we had time to get properly cleaned up, so inside we went to get sorted. At that point we discovered that we had been horribly mistaken: we hadn’t actually been washing away the three years of dirt on the car! As it turned out, we’d actually been collecting all of it under our fingernails; that’s the only way to explain how they could have become so horrendously dirty. Shortly after this discovery we determined that there doesn’t appear to be a single nail brush anywhere in Nannie’s house (she wasn’t home to ask). We managed to extricate the Muck Of Ages through Vigorous Cleansing, but my fingers were complaining for a couple of days after this…

We got to Peggy and Rodger’s exactly on time, despite managing to get somewhat misdirected on the way to their house (it’s a left, then a right, then the first left … no, wait, it was the second left … oh, phooey, where’s the map?), only to be greeted with “About time!” from Rodger. We’re pretty sure he was referring to the three year delay since our last visit, though… We visited for a while, catching up on things that had been going on in our lives since our last visit. Talking with Peggy and Rodger is always highly amusing for me: Rodger is a big, rough South Louisiana Cajun, while Peggy is… definitely not, and their interaction is always fun to watch. Eventually, Rodger declared that his belly was rumbling, so we piled into their car to go to Imperial Cathay. The meal there was wonderful, and they have been added to the list of places we know we can go to to get decent food when we’re in Shreveport. (Yes, that’s Chinese for lunch and dinner. What can I say? I was really jonesing for Chinese.) We chatted over dinner, and eventually returned to Peggy and Rodger’s house for more catching up and dessert in the form of cakes baked by the children of their neighbour as part of a charity fundraiser and educational exercise. They were pretty tasty, and were cooked into Easter bunny shapes as we were pretty close to Easter at this point. Neither SJ or myself are religious, but that Easter Sunday would take on some significance during our trip…

When we left Peggy and Rodger’s we finally looked at the time, only to find it was 10pm – time flies when you’re with good friends! On the way back, we decided to go to Target, as I needed new trousers: I’d found that the black jeans I’d brought over with us had a hole in them, so I only had one pair of wearable trousers at this point! Unfortunately, when we got to Target, they had just closed; the doors were still open, but when we walked in we were informed that they were closed by a very peeved-sounding worker over the store PA system. So we headed back to Nannie’s, did a bit of sorting for the next day, and generally prepared ourselves for bed, although we had to stay up until 12:20! SJ was still taking antibiotics at this point, and the timing of the pills, and fitting food around them, meant that we couldn’t have any more of SJ’s ice cream birthday cake until 12:20. We’re generally up til around then usually, but it would’ve been nice to get to bed earlier the night before setting off on our road trip. Hey ho.

After consuming cake, we headed to bed for the last night at Nannie’s before the Great Road Trip.