Day Two – Indiana

I'm back!! We were out in the boondocks with no internet connection, so I missed a couple of blog days. But I still wrote my story on the computer, so here it is...

Miles traveled: 419
Hours on the road: 7
States covered: 3 – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana

We woke up around 7 a.m. and had breakfast in the lounge. The boys loaded their plates with everything sweet they could find, and then not one of them finished their food.

We hit the road by 8:30, and the ride was magnificent. I set the cruise control at 67 and nothing got in our way. Since it was Saturday, we ran into ZERO construction traffic in both Ohio and Indiana.

After all the anxiety I had about driving with the bubble on the roof, we passed a car driven by what looked like a college student, and on the roof sat a bike sitting on a mattress, both tied down with two bungees. He didn’t even bother to remove the sheet from the mattress. The load was riding high and flapping in the wind, but it wasn’t falling off.

Along the drive yesterday, we decided we had to name our GPS guy; I had chosen an Australian man. I suggested two names, both of which were characters from a play I had seen in New Haven about Aborigines from Australia. The names were Malawa and Bulembul, and I may as well have had two heads with the way the boys looked at me when I suggested those names. Cal said, “Why not just call him Lee, since that’s his name.” I hadn’t realized that the GPS speakers actually had names, so rather than Malawa or Bulembul, our guy is now called Lee.

Today Lee said very little. We were on the same highway for 370 miles; there isn’t much to say about that. Then there’s Parker, who has a lot to say about everything. Like, when I said they (the boys) would have been really impressed with the forest we would have seen if we had camped the night before rather than stayed in a hotel. I made that remark because we were driving through such beautiful, lush, mountainous forests near that area at the time. Parker said, “You see one forest, you’ve seen them all.”

We made it most of the way without much fanfare, until we got off the highway. To get off the highway, we had to pay a toll, only, Indiana does not pay for people to sit at the toll booths. They have machines that you pay. You insert the ticket you got earlier from another machine and the new machine tells you how much you owe. The machine then rejects 80% of the dollar bills you try to pay it with. Thanks to such a system, it took us more than 10 minutes to get through that toll.

After we made it through the toll booth, Lee told us to take a right into town. But we could not. The main road through town was blocked for some kind of town party. So Lee, being a good GPS, rerouted us, and we went straight instead, and even passed a horse that must have had something to do with the celebration. A few blocks down, we took a different right, and shortly after that, I stopped to let a man cross the street. But he wasn’t a man crossing the street. He was a man looking for an opportune time to stop traffic so he could let a parade enter that road. As I was sitting there waving the man on, Parker yelled, “No, Mom, it’s a parade. Don’t let them out!” But it was too late. Several haggard-looking women dressed in their best cutoffs and old –shirts lead a gaggle of pre-schoolers out in front of us. They were followed by an antique truck, which was followed by a giant truck – the kind of tow truck that tows other trucks – pulling a float loaded with girls dressed for the prom sitting on what was supposed to be a pirate ship. We know it was supposed to be a pirate ship because on the side it said “pirate.” Then there were two little cars, two golf carts, a flower-delivery truck that had a sign on top reading: “Thank you, Bristol,” (I believe it was the town’s name, not a reference to Sarah’s daughter) and that was it.

When we arrived at our campground, I could tell right away that it was the kind of campground that people set up their site for the whole summer and come back every weekend. We found our site and started setting up when a van pulled in right along our site. We already had the tarp and the tent laid out, and all I could think was, “Great, we’re at the wrong site.” But it was my friend, Greg Timm, who had come with his wife and daughter to visit with us. I had met Greg through my brother-in-law, Vance, when I was out at Purdue. They drove three hours each way and ended up staying only about an hour and a half, but it was great to see him and meet his family.

After Greg left, I cooked sausages for dinner then took the boys swimming in the pool. On the walk to the pool I noticed a group of old people sitting in the pavilion, all facing one guy sitting alone at a table. Our first thought was that they were playing Bingo. But they weren’t. We kept walking to the pool, but my second thought, having watched too many horror movies, is that it was a group of the elders from the camp sitting down to decide who would be their next sacrifice. I was picturing the kids and me awoken from a sound sleep to the sight of robed people holding torches forcing us out of the tent toward their alter. It was all too much for me, so while the kids swam, I called Jeff. He didn’t answer, so my mind raced more. Then to make matters worse, a police car went speeding by, down the road that has a 10 mph speed limit that the owners take very seriously (I heard them yell at someone for going too fast). Then another cop car went by. Lovely!

A while later a teenage girl came to the pool and informed her grandmother (one of the elders?) that the police were there for a domestic dispute between a man and two kids. Again, lovely. Watching the interaction of the grandmother and her grandkids made me feel a little more at ease, so I didn’t pack us up and hightail it out of Peyton Place that night. In fact, the grandmother commented to me that my boys had said something about choking someone out. That’s my boys -- they freak everyone else out!

The mosquitoes back at camp were really bad, and I was very tired, so we went to bed early. The mattresses were so comfortable and the evening so cool, my relaxation level was extremely high, until a boy farted. I was so mad, I gave a five minute lecture on rudeness at the end of which another boy farted. Let’s just say, it won’t happen again. New rule – hang your butt out the tent to fart!

I wrote a little on the computer and the boys wrote in their journals, then we had lights out around 10 p.m. Then we had lights on around midnight, when a storm blew in with lightning the likes of which New England has never seen and thunder to match. The rain didn’t get too bad, but we decided to sleep in the van, just to be safe. Parker and I were in the front seats, Trey was behind Parker, and Cal slept on the floor in the way back. We couldn’t put the windows down because the mosquitoes were so bad, so we nearly suffocated while we slept. When I woke up and realized that the storm had passed and that we were all soaked from sweat, I woke Parker up to see if he wanted to move into the tent. He said he didn’t, but I couldn’t take it anymore, so I locked the boys in the van and I moved into the tent alone. It was like heaven, so cool, so bug free, so quiet. Then I started worrying (imagine that) that the boys were really going to suffocate in the van. So, I got up out of bed and knocked on Parker’s window so he would unlock the door. What I found out is that when a Kia is locked, you cannot open it from the inside without an alarm going off. I frantically took the keys from Parker and pushed all the buttons on the fob to stop the horrendous noise the van was making. Turns out, the unlock button on the key fob stops the alarm. Trying to wake Cal up was nearly impossible. When I opened the hatchback, a puff of steam similar to that you’d find in a sauna came out, and for a moment I thought Cal might be dead. He didn’t move when I called his name or even when I nudged him a little. I had to rough him up to get him to move. I think I woke him up just in time!

We slept great the rest of the night. Though there was no more thunder and lightning, the rain never stopped until morning.

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