The Hamster and the Highway

Every night as I start to write this, I think back on the day and try to come up with some kind of unifying theme or idea, or at least something our various activities had in common.

Today we were in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. We saw a lighthouse, a brewery, a mansion, and a candy warehouse. The best I can do in terms of unifying them is the alliteration in the title of the post. Which is appropriate, because the only other thing they all have in common is that they were pretty enjoyable but not quite as great as we had hoped. So in more ways than one, if I were to give Thursday a letter grade, that letter would be a B.

Despite everything we did in Milwaukee yesterday, we still had more of the city to see today. We started at Lake Park, so named because of its location on the shore of Lake Michigan. The park’s main attraction is the historic North Point Lighthouse, which protected ships from the shore for well over a century before it was decommissioned in 1994 when GPS became widely available and ships no longer needed lighthouses for navigation.

 

The attached building used to be the lightkeeper’s quarters but now houses a cute little museum about the history of the lighthouse. It’s the kind of museum that would take a normal person 15-20 minutes to get through. Unfortunately, the woman who was working there when we arrived took it upon herself to walk us through the entire museum, explaining every photo and artifact, thus forcing us to spend almost an hour listening to her tell us stories that were all explained by the text of the museum and half of which we would’ve skipped if we had been perusing on our own.

Eventually she let us climb up to the top of the lighthouse, which was all we wanted to do all along. Our patience was rewarded, as the sky was clear and we had spectacular views of the lake and of downtown Milwaukee.

 

Upon leaving we had another interesting view from the ground: the park was absolutely packed with zombies staring at their phones in a desperate search for Pokémon. Seriously. Dozens of people just standing in the middle of a park, right next to each other, interacting with nobody, saying nothing, ignoring the beautiful views, completely entranced by the possibility that they might capture a virtual imaginary creature.

I know I’m hardly being original when I mock the zombie-like state of Pokémon Go players, but holy crap, we’ve been to many of the most fun parts of a dozen states, and we see this everywhere. It’s great that this game is getting people outside, but what good does it do if they don’t even realize they’re outside? As my grandmother would’ve said, it’s enough to drive you to drink. So that’s exactly what we did.

Most people’s first association with Milwaukee is either beer or Happy Days. We saw the Fonz yesterday, so today we needed to see some beer.

Miller, like most major breweries in this country, gives free tours that include tasting. I’ve now been on four of these tours (Budweiser, Coors, Sam Adams, and Miller). What makes the Miller tour a little different from the others is its focus on the packaging and distribution rather than the actual beermaking. We got to watch as cans and bottles sped through the factory conveyor belts, which was pretty cool to see.

 

Sorry, wrong photo. Here are the real ones:

 

We also got a peek at the massive warehouse, which holds roughly 15 million beers briefly each day before getting them onto trucks for distribution. And maybe the most interesting part was walking into one of the caves dug by hand in the brewery’s early days so that barrels of beer could be stored in a cool, dark place.

But we heard absolutely nothing about how the beer is made. No discussion of hops or barley, and only the briefest mention that the strain of yeast they use is the same yeast that founder Frederick Miller brought with him when he immigrated from Germany. There’s an optional add-on to the tour that takes people up to see the actual vats and tanks they use to make and age the beer, but they mentioned that there’s no A/C in the rooms, which stay at around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. We declined.

All in all, the tour was pretty good but not as good as the others I’ve been on. The best part, surprisingly, was when our tour guides, Kaylie and Bailey (really), told Sam that he looks just like someone in a Miley Cyrus movie called The Last Song. We looked it up, and OH MY G-D, THEY’RE TOTALLY RIGHT!

 

You see it, right? I know the hair is different, but the face is an exact replica. It’s uncanny. Here, let me show you one without the hair so you can see it more clearly:

 

The kid’s name is Bobby Coleman. The more photos we found the more freaky it got. An image search is like looking through photo albums of Sam. I actually have pictures of him in some of the same poses, making some of the same faces.

Anyway, when we finished at Miller it was time to have one more beer (baron) before leaving Milwaukee. Frederick Pabst (what is it with the Fredericks?) took over his father-in-law’s brewery in the mid-1800s, renamed it after himself, and built it into one of the largest breweries in the world (for a while, at least). He became the richest guy in Milwaukee, and built himself a Flemish Renaissance revival mansion in a trendy part of town. The Pabst mansion is still there, still maintained, and there are public tours on the hour.

 

Unfortunately, the timing of the tours was such that if we took the tour it would mean we’d probably miss the last Jelly Belly factory tour of the day (Jelly Belly is about 45 minutes away in Pleasant Prairie, WI). Faced with such a choice, we decided to skip the Pabst tour so we’d be sure to catch the Jelly Belly tour.

One factor in our decision was the little sign on the Pabst mansion saying that photography is not allowed on the tour. I hate that. How does it hurt to allow photography? Are you really concerned that if people see my photos, they won’t pay to take the tour themselves?

Since we were already there, we spent a few minutes walking around the exterior of the house, and out of spite I took a photo through one of the windows. Please steel yourself emotionally before you feast your eyes on this incredibly illicit image:

Take that, Pabst!

We did indeed make it to Pleasant Prairie in time for the Jelly Belly tour. But it turned out to be just a tour of the warehouse, not the factory, so we saw no actual production of jelly beans. We did, however, get to wear ridiculous paper hats and ride in a little train to take the tour, so it was a net positive.

 

The tour itself turned out to be pretty lame. An unenthused tour guide read everything off a paper, and the train just took us from one video screen to another so we could watch brief videos about the company’s history, the other types of candy they make, and how they make the jelly beans.

The real excitement was the candy store at the end of the tour. Most of the items were pretty pricey, but they also sold cheap bags of “irregular” candies that are slightly off in size or shape. More important, there’s a sampling bar where you can have a couple of jelly beans of any flavor they make, and there’s no limit. Sam and I made the guy behind the bar work pretty hard. My favorite moment was when Sam asked to try the beer-flavored jelly beans, bit into them, and loudly announced to the entire room, “Wow, that really tastes like beer!”

We had dinner in Chicago, despite monumental traffic that attempted to prevent us from ever getting near the city. Dinner, like the rest of the day, was not outstanding, but it was good.

 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

One autumn day in 1797, the famous Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wasn’t feeling well. He took some opium to ease the pain, fell asleep, and had a wild, opium-fueled dream about a powerful despot who built a pleasure palace called Xanadu.

When Coleridge awoke, he immediately began writing down this vivid dream in poetry. He called the poem “Xanadu, or A Vision in a Dream.” Unfortunately, before he finished the poem someone knocked on the door of his farmhouse, interrupting his train of thought, and by the time he got rid of the visitor and went back to writing, the dream had vanished from his memory and the poem remains unfinished today.

I’m telling you this story not because Coleridge is a favorite of mine, although he is. I’m telling you this story not because I’m an English teacher and I can’t help myself, although I am, and I can’t. I’m telling you this story because I thought about that poem and its unusual origin this morning as The Hamster and I wandered through the strangest place either of us has ever been.

The House on the Rock was not originally on our itinerary. Its main appeal is as an oddity, not as a destination where you really do anything or learn anything; you just wander through the sprawling complex and think to yourself, “Hmmh. That’s so weird.” And its location in Spring Green, Wisconsin, was an hour out of our way, which is right about the threshold for where you start cutting stuff like this off your itinerary.

But, as luck would have it, our route changed a bit over the past couple of days. And because of our fly fishing excursion, The House on the Rock ended up being almost directly on our new-and-improved route, which made it a no-brainer to include.

I don’t know how to describe the place except to say that it began as the work of a creative architect named Alex Jordan, who built a house for himself on a rocky plateau in the woods, and it grew into something so twisted and ridiculous that even the kajillion photos I took can’t possibly give you any idea of what the place is really like.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

The house itself is exceedingly unusual, built right into the rock and incorporating the rock into the house’s interior in a way that would make Frank Lloyd Wright say, “OK, I get it. Enough with the natural materials, already.” The ceilings are uncomfortably low, there’s carpeting everywhere, (even occasionally the ceiling), much of the seating is just stone with thin cushions placed on top, none of the rooms are a normal size or shape or function, there’s ornate detail in every direction you look, and the décor is probably best described as “Asian-inspired cave creep fest.”

 

The coolest part of the house is the Infinity Room, a long, thin, cantilevered sun room that juts out precariously over the hillside and narrows to a point, creating the visual effect of appearing to go on forever.

 

But it’s when you’re done walking through the main house and start looking through the connected buildings that things start getting truly strange, and they get only stranger until finally, a couple of hours later, your mind is boggled, your head is spun, and you’re standing in the gift shop wondering what the hell it is you just saw.

At this point I’d like to point out of the existence of the love urinal. I’ve named it the love urinal because the only people who would ever feel comfortable using such a device would be two men who are so deeply in love that they simply cannot take their eyes off each other long enough to pee in private.

 

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

I’d be remiss, too, if I did not mention the musical instruments. I’ve been in several homes where people have musical instruments on display. I’ve never been in a home where the musical instruments play themselves. In room after room after room there were automatic instruments, with piano keys depressing themselves, drums beating themselves, and little robotic arms plucking and stroking the strings of violins and cellos, etc. Sometimes animatronic figurines played the instruments. Sometimes there was nobody, and the instruments played themselves. Sometimes there were just a few members of the band, and sometimes there were entire orchestras.

 

And none of this even scratches the surface of the weirdness we beheld throughout.

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Instead of trying, vainly, to show you the place, I’m simply going to show you one room. It’s three stories high, and it’s called The Heritage of the Sea because it houses Jordan’s extensive collection of maritime artifacts. (There’s a whole section about the Titanic, complete with a 10-foot-long scale model, stock certificates, ads for the voyage, and more.) Also, the main purpose of the room is to display a massive, life-size sculpture of a fierce battle between a giant squid and a terrifying whale, which Jordan created specifically to put here, I can only assume, so he could freak people the hell out for generations to come.

Yes, that’s a shattered rowboat inside the whale’s mouth.

 

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

It all made me think of Coleridge for two reasons. First, The House on the Rock is most definitely Jordan’s Xanadu: a massive pleasure-dome he decreed with endless beauty and which we meandered with a mazy motion for what seemed like five miles, but also with haunting sounds and ancestral voices.

I also pictured Alex Jordan having an opium-fueled nightmare, then waking up and, Coleridge-style, building all the crazy stuff he dreamt.

Or, as Sam so eloquently put it, “Alex Jordan is seriously freakin’ demented.”

By the time we got to Milwaukee a few hours later, standing next to a bronze statue of a fictional TV character on the banks of a river instantly became the most normal thing I had done all day.

 

OK, back to reality.

On the way to Milwaukee we stopped briefly in Madison to take a peek at the state capitol. From above, it’s shaped roughly like a plus sign with a dome in the middle, which means that it looks like a lot of the other state capitols, with one notable exception: the main entrance is not on one of the straight sides but in the crook of two arms of the plus.

Points for originality.

We got to Milwaukee at around 3 p.m., and tried to see as much of the city as we could before heading to tonight’s Brewers game. I had been to Milwaukee once before but only for a ballgame, so I never got to really see the city. So of course we headed straight for the Bronze Fonz.

Fonz is right on the Milwaukee River, one of many odd pieces of art along the Riverwalk. Riverwalk is exactly what it sounds like: a walkway that runs along both banks of the river for several blocks. It’s similar in concept to the Canal Walk in Indianapolis, and we’ll see a few more of these types of downtown waterfront pedestrian paths in the coming week or so, but each city puts its own stamp on the idea. Milwaukee does this with several quirky sculptures along the path, plenty of boat rentals and pleasure cruises for those who want to be in the river instead of alongside it, and by situating the whole thing in the theater district, which means that the Riverwalk is lined with theaters old and new, big and small, indoors and out. It’s really quite beautiful.

 

When we finished with the Riverwalk we still had time for one more venue, and we decided on the Harley-Davidson Museum. I had initially hoped to go on the Harley-Davidson factory tour, which is about a half hour out of town, but their really good tour is on hiatus until the end of August, and their not-as-good tour is not really worth the trip. But that still left the museum, which houses around 150 old motorcycles in addition to various exhibits about the company’s founders and history and the design of the bikes.

Sam didn’t really care about the history or why Harleys are designed the way they are. He just wanted to look at some cool motorcycles and maybe even sit on a few. That was easy enough to accomplish.

We breezed through the museum in half an hour, mostly because Sam opted to skip all text and just focus on the bikes he found interesting. That left us just enough time to get dinner and head to the ballpark.

There are two kosher restaurants in Milwaukee. One of them is closed until August 15. The other is inside a nursing home. So 20 minutes later we were in the Jewish Home and Care Center stuffing ourselves with fried fish and French fries, the first real meal we’ve had since Shabbat. And we made it to the Brewers game just in time.

So far this trip has taken us only to minor league games, and I guess we’ve gotten a little spoiled in terms of seat location, because when we walked up to the ticket window, Sam asked if anything was available in the first row. Thankfully, the Brewers stink and nobody goes to the games, so we still managed to get great seats for a decent price.

 

As far as the ballpark, Miller Park is one of my least favorite. Many new parks are downtown but Miller Park is on the outskirts of the city, surrounded not by interesting neighborhoods or a beautiful skyline but by endless parking lots and highway on- and off- ramps. Its retractable roof requires high walls on all sides, which makes you feel like you’re indoors even when the roof is open, as it was tonight. And it’s cavernous, with four full decks of seats, most of which are empty. Also, it’s the only current stadium that ever killed a guy. (For real–high winds cause a crane to collapse during the stadium’s construction, killing one of the workers.)

I wouldn’t exactly call it a pleasure-dome.

Still, we had a great time wandering the ballpark, cheering against the visiting Atlanta Braves, watching the famous sausage race, and getting friendly with the team mascot, Bernie Brewer.

 

About halfway through the game, Sam started insisting that the sparse crowd would enable us to catch a foul ball or a T-shirt, or at least have our smiling faces shown on the big screen. I asked him why he was so confident. His answer: “Dad, we’re in the front row, and I’m wearing a giant yellow mustache!”

 

 

Sure enough, two innings later I suddenly noticed that we were on the big screen, and I started shouting and waving. Sam immediately popped up out of his seat and did an odd little dance, which was all the more hilarious because of the mustache. Our whole section cheered like crazy.

The Brewers ended up winning a tight game, and we joked all the way out of the stadium and back to our car.

After an exceedingly strange morning at The House on the Rock, we really enjoyed getting to know Milwaukee. We’ve got some more sights to see here Thursday before heading to Chicago and beyond. But first Sam needs to comb his giant yellow mustache.

Today was a little crazy and very exhausting. The WiFi in our hotel didn’t work at all, so Sam and I made a quick video to fill you in. Unfortunately, I had all sorts of trouble getting the video uploaded, too. But I’ve got WiFi now, so here’s the video in two parts, followed by some accompanying photos. Enjoy!

Part I:

 

Part II:

 

Photos!

 

 

 

 

 

This morning we hopped into the car with boundless energy, excited to finally make it to North Dakota. We had a little more than an hour’s drive to Fargo, and the weather was fantastic, so despite our fears of stuff flying out of the backseat as we drove at (OK, slightly above) the 80 MPH speed limit, we put the top down and soaked up the sun.

 

Fargo is a meaningful milestone in this trip for a few reasons. One is that it’s our farthest stop from home – the last stop before we head east toward home. But, more significant, crossing the border means that I’ve now been to 49 states, missing only Louisiana. (Sam is right behind me with 48 and will get to 49 sometime tomorrow when we cross into Wisconsin.) For these two reasons, when anyone has asked in the past couple of months where we were heading on this summer’s road trip, our answer was “North Dakota.”

Which is all to say that we were eagerly anticipating today. It went nothing like we expected.

The drive to Fargo was fun. We learned, among other things, that North Dakota is so sparsely populated that everyone there has their own exit on the highway.

 

Some people’s exit signs even tell you what they’re having for dinner.

 

Fargo is billed as the biggest and most exciting city in North Dakota, so we planned to spend the whole day there, but we quickly discovered that even the exciting stuff isn’t all that exciting.

We started with the Roger Maris Museum, which is literally inside a mall.

 

 

And it’s not even a storefront in a mall–it’s just a nice display that juts out slightly in a hallway, right next to a pet store.

 

There’s an interesting collection of Maris’s awards, including his 1961 MVP trophy.

 

There’s also little alcove with a few seats from Yankee Stadium circa 1960, and a documentary about Maris that plays on a loop.

 

On the plus side, the museum is free. But even being huge baseball fans, we were in and out in about 20 minutes.

Upon leaving the mall we then followed traffic signs to “Downtown Fargo” but never saw anything that looked like a downtown. Mainly we saw a ton of auto parts stores, fast food restaurants, and RV sales shops.

Up next was a Viking ship that’s just outside Fargo, in a Norwegian museum in Minnesota.

 

It looked pretty cool, but then we read the posted information about it and learned that it’s not original–it’s a reproduction that was built in the 1970s to celebrate the area’s Norwegian heritage, and then sailed to Norway and back. That’s still kind of impressive, but not as impressive as actual Vikings.

From there we headed back into Fargo proper to Bonanzaville, a historic village made out of relocated but original buildings and artifacts from North Dakota’s frontier days. This was the most fun we had in Fargo. We walked into the first house ever built in Fargo, as well as a frontier schoolhouse, a frontier bar, and a frontier jail.

 

There was also a small museum of old cars and a separate air museum, both of which were cute but thoroughly underwhelming after last week’s visits to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the US Air Force Museum, respectively.

At this point we had planned to attend a Fargo-Moorehead Redhawks baseball game, but when we finished Bonanzaville it wasn’t even 2 p.m.. So instead of waiting around until 7 for a minor-league ballgame, we decided to head out of town and start the long journey home ahead of schedule.

This is when a bunch of other dominos started falling.

The next part of our journey is pretty simple: take I-94 east from Fargo through Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago, all the way to Detroit, making some extra stops along the way to break up the drive every time we can find something fun or interesting.

Leaving Fargo a half day early meant that we’d probably be in Minneapolis by nightfall, which would be almost a full day early. That opened up a window for my “special project.”

I’ve been trying to arrange a fly fishing excursion at some point on this trip, but since I know absolutely nothing about fly fishing or even where you can do it, it hasn’t been so easy. I also haven’t really been able to figure out when to fit it into our schedule. I originally thought we could do it yesterday in South Dakota, but it turns out that there’s no fly fishing in the eastern half of the state. So I started looking at Minnesota and Wisconsin. There are better options there, so when we left Bonanzaville I started calling random fishing gear shops in Minnesota to ask basic, obvious questions like the rube that I am.

Ultimately I got my answer: Minnesota guides tend to book up at least a week in advance, but there are more places to fish in Wisconsin, so that’d be a better bet on short notice. One call led to another, which led to another, and the bottom line is that I booked a guide to take us fly fishing in rural Wisconsin Tuesday afternoon. All we have to do is get there, but it’s 3.5 hours off our I-94 path, and we’ve got the entire state of Minnesota between us.

I live in New York; when else am I ever going to go fly fishing? Let’s do it.

With a completely new, seat-of-our-pants plan for the next couple of days, we headed east. That brought us first to Alexandria, Minnesota, which does a more impressive job of celebrating its Viking past than does Fargo. It’s the home of the Runestone Museum, which in turn houses a world-renowned stone with Viking carvings. We decided to skip the museum and head straight to its mascot, a 30-foot statue of a Viking affectionately known as Big Ole (as in, let’s go see the Big Ole Viking).

By this time Sam and I were both pretty tired of driving, so Sam started watching one of my favorite 80s movies, Better Off Dead. I, meanwhile, just kept on driving. There are perks of being the only adult on these trips, but being behind the wheel for seemingly endless hours of seemingly endless hours of farmland is not one of them. Of course, we hadn’t originally planned to do all this driving in one day, but what we had originally planned was no longer relevant.

And speaking of the unplanned, a few days ago we decided to add a stop between Alexandria and Minneapolis: Darwin, Minnesota, home of the world’s biggest ball of twine. Now, you may remember from our first road trip that Sam and I have already been to the see the biggest ball of twine, and it was in Cawker City, Kansas. But here’s the thing: the Kansas ball is, in fact, bigger than the Minnesota ball, but the Minnesota ball was rolled by only one man, thus making it the biggest solo ball of twine. The Kansas ball was originally rolled by one man, but he died while it was still only the second biggest, and then the town decided to honor him by finishing what he started. In fact, you might remember that Sam and I added a few orbits of twine to the ball when we were there. But that doesn’t happen in Darwin, because the folks in Darwin are purists about these things.

You’d think that people in a town called Darwin would have figured out a way by now to rise above all competitors (survival of the fittest, and whatnot), but alas, there remain competing claims to the title of Biggest Ball.

Yes, I know that the whole thing is quite stupid, and that they’re both impressively large balls of twine regardless of how they got that way. They even both live in their own gazebo, and they both have their own mailbox. The Hamster and I probably could have lived our entire lives fulfilled and contented with seeing only the Kansas ball. But when I learned that we’d be passing within a half hour or so of the Minnesota ball, how could I resist?

 

What can I say? It’s a big ball. We came, we saw, we got back in the car.

The rest of the drive to Minneapolis was exhausting, and much slower and longer than we anticipated. But getting closer and closer to the city energized us. For one thing, we had a great time in Minneapolis on the first road trip, and have nothing but fond memories. For another, we were excited to see building more than three stories high for the first time since Omaha.

A real city! With a real skyline! And street lights! After a day of tiny cities and rural driving, this was exciting stuff.

The struggle with revisiting any city is finding things to do and see that we didn’t do last time, but are still worthwhile. Minneapolis is such a great city that this proved to be pretty easy. But by the time we got to town it was already 7:30, and we hadn’t eaten dinner, and I needed to pee, so we decided to take in just one sight before finding a place to eat and sleep (and pee).

That place was the descriptively named Stone Arch Bridge, a 150-year-old bridge that was originally built to carry trains across the Mississippi in an industrial part of town.

 

The old mills there are no longer functioning and one in particular has largely crumbled, but the neighborhood was revitalized in the 1990s. The bridge is now open only to pedestrians and bikes, and is surrounded by the absolutely beautiful Mill Ruins Park.

A few of the old factories are still there, juxtaposed with modern apartments and an ultramodern performing arts center.

 

With downtown skyscrapers in the background and the Mississippi doing a waterfall thing over the nearby dam, the setting was at once majestic, rustic, natural, and urban. As the sun set, the quirky, eclectic view couldn’t have been much more beautiful.

 

Hundreds of people were there to exercise, have professional photo shoots, propose, or just enjoy the scenery. And none of them were looking at their phones.

It’s stuff like this that makes us love Minneapolis. It’s clean, there’s not much traffic, and people are generally nice and friendly, so it has a bit of a small-town feel, but it also feels like a grown-up, big-boy city, with lots of interesting neighborhoods and sections and all sorts of quirky places and events. It has real color. It has a great mix of skyscrapers and parks, old and new, and everything seems to be designed thoughtfully and smartly. And to top it off, parking isn’t terribly hard to find, and it’s pretty easy to get around.

The only problem was that I still needed to pee. The park was so beautiful that we would have loved to have dinner right there (and by this time we were starving), but I needed a bathroom, STAT.

I decided we should just head to our hotel so I could pee there, and then we’d figure out dinner. The only problem with that plan was that we had no hotel.

The last time we were in Minneapolis, we stayed in a very dated but roomy and clean (and relatively cheap) hotel not too far from downtown. I thought it would be fun to stay there again, but when I looked it up I found out that it has since closed down.

I didn’t want to spend a fortune to be downtown, but I also don’t know the place well enough to know where all the non-downtown hotels were. It wasn’t easy, but I was able to find a place in a very close suburb that is both nice and affordable. We hurried there, I finally peed, and we finally ate dinner at about 9 p.m.

What started out as a thoroughly planned and not-that-busy day ended up getting completely packed, a little odd, and completely off script, but we did some fun stuff in between all the driving, Sam laughed out loud at Better Off Dead, I’ve now been to 49 states, and tomorrow Sam will be able to say the same.

Sunday we did very little, considering. We slept a little late, we spent a few hours at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo, we drove roughly 400 miles to the northeast corner of South Dakota, we ate dinner at a South Dakota rest stop with ridiculously beautiful views, and we climbed a six-story watchtower that gave us views of three states (North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota).

Sam loved the zoo, and his favorite part–aside from the various animals we saw–was the zoo’s research center, only because it was named after a couple named Bill and Bearnice Grewcock. Several minutes of giggling ensued, along with lots of joking. (“Did you know Bearnice Grewcock?” “No, I never knew Bearnice Grewcock.”)

With about five straight hours of driving, we did get kind of bored in the car, but Sam watched 61*, preparing him for the Roger Maris Museum we’ll visit in Fargo on Monday. Counting cows helped only so much, because we saw so many that I ended up winning 685-670.

Still, the day was pretty enjoyable. Without much to say, I’ll share some of my favorite photos from today. Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I love most about Shabbat is simply having time to refresh and rejuvenate, both physically and spiritually. That was just as true this week, when Sam and I took the opportunity to catch up on much-needed sleep and to repair the damage done Friday.

We both slept 12 hours. We also ate very well, thanks to Israel and Parissa, a husband-and-wife catering team in Indianapolis who provided us with our meals. My favorite was the Persian meatballs with peas and sweet potato, while Sam’s favorite was the giant, plate-sized chocolate chip cookie they made for dessert.

More important, we talked out what had happened on Friday morning, including what led to it, why it was such a big deal, and how to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future. Shabbat afternoons in the summer are long, and being cooped up in a hotel room all day while a big family reunion takes over all of the hotel’s facilities can try one’s patience, but we actually got along very well all day. We travel with a little backpack that we optimistically call “The Magical Bag of Shabbos Fun” because it contains the travel board games, playing cards, and books that keep us entertained throughout the long Shabbat afternoons. We played some of the games, we spent some time reading, we spent some time reminiscing about previous road trips, and all was right with the world.

We also decided to change up the plan for Sunday. Originally we were going to head out of town early, but we decided to stay a little longer in Omaha. We tend to avoid zoos and aquariums on the road because we have great ones at home, but we learned yesterday that the Omaha Zoo is widely regarded as one of the best in the world, and Sam loves animals, so we’re going to stick around for a while longer, and we’ll get to North Dakota (state #49 for me and 48 for Sam) one day later than we originally planned.

All we have to do to make it work is to skip the air museum in Fargo, and considering how unimpressive it’s bound to be compared to the Air Force museum in Dayton, that’s probably for the best.

In the end, I’m glad we didn’t head home. He’s a massive pain sometimes, but I really love that kid.

Friday turned into a disaster before we even left our motel room.

As we were getting ready for the day, Sam lied to me about something. I don’t want to bore you with the details, so I won’t go into them. But it was immediately obvious he was lying, and when I called him on it he stubbornly insisted that he hadn’t lied. I got angrier and angrier, and he dug in deeper and deeper.

Nobody likes being lied to, but I take it more personally than most people. I am always honest, and I deeply value honesty in others. And as a high school teacher, I spend a pretty high percentage of my workday being lied to, so I get particularly upset when I’m being lied to in my personal life.

We had a huge fight. Huge. I can’t even remember the last time I was so angry at him. By the time we got into the car, I set the GPS to our home address.

In tears, Sam made a desperate call to his mom for help. With her intervention, I agreed to continue west to Omaha and spend Shabbat trying to repair our relationship and see if it was worth seeing our trip through to completion.

Our first stop was just a half mile from our motel: the site of Bonny and Clyde’s last bank robbery before police finally caught up with them. In front of the building there’s supposedly a plaque remembering the event, but we’ll never know because the road was closed in all directions because the exact intersection where the old bank stood is being completely rebuilt.

 

 

Needless to say, my mood was not improving. I grudgingly, angrily headed to our next stop: Adair, Iowa, the site of another historic robbery. This one was the first-ever train robbery in the West, perpetuated by Billy the Kid and his gang. It’s commemorated on the by a 20-foot stretch of train track on the side of a road, and a big train wheel with a plaque on it.

 

Adair is also the home of a water tower painted as a smiley face–ironic considering our moods.

 

I’ll admit that the giant smile did actually make me crack a smile for just a moment. I was still sore, and it certainly didn’t turn the day around, but it didn’t hurt.

 

The next destination brought the frustration right back. Remember when I said that worthwhile attractions in central Iowa are kind of hard to find? Well, In the very small farming town of Brayton, Iowa, there’s a big tree growing right in the middle of an intersection. Compared to the rest of Iowa, this is what counts as worth seeing. The only problem was that we couldn’t find it. It’s on Nighthawk Road, but Nighthawk Road stops and starts and stops and starts again, and we couldn’t find the right part of it. Now would be a good time to mention that the roads are all gravel roads.

So there I was, in a terrible mood, furious at my only companion, wishing I was home, completely lost on gravel roads looking for an effing tree. We eventually found the tree, which was certainly odd and eye-catching, if not really worth the hassle.

 

The thing is, in a better mood I would have seen all these annoyances as adding to the adventure. But the morning’s argument had turned everything negative in my eyes.

 

Even the sight of a giant steel spider with the body of a Volkswagon Beetle in Avoca, Iowa, couldn’t brighten my spirits.

What finally started turning the day around was Omaha. It’s on the Missouri River, a literal stone’s throw from the western border of Iowa. And it was our first stop there that finally put a real smile on my face.

Omaha is known for three things: Warren Buffett, the College World Series, and tornados. Warren Buffett is a little out of our league, and the College World Series is played in June, so those were never options for us. As for tornados, the weather was sunny with temperatures in the high 70s today, so we appear to be safe, at least for now.

So we had to dig a little to find fun stuff to do in Omaha, but we found enough. For one thing, it was kind of nice to finally make it into Nebraska, my 48th state (and Sam’s 47th). But then we went to a historic neighborhood near downtown called Old Market, and that was even better.

Old Market is known for its cobblestone streets and its quirky and cool restaurants and shops.

 

Our favorite was a store called City Limit, which sells all sorts of fun, snarky, or otherwise unusual items. There were odd books of all sorts, literary and historical action figures and bobbleheads, obnoxious greeting cards, and so much more that I don’t know how to describe it all. I got a couple of pairs of really odd socks and some My Little Pony Pez dispensers. Sam got himself a pair of little rubber feet that are meant to be worn on your fingers.

My fury started to ease, and we had a pretty good time wandering the neighborhood and its funky shops.

 

The next stop was a somewhat disappointing Lewis and Clark thing that turned out to be just an informative visitors center. But a couple of blocks away was a much better attraction: the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge, which curves back and forth across the Missouri River, connecting Iowa and Nebraska with particular beauty.

 

 

One thing we like about Omaha is that there are nice little parks and statues scattered around, including downtown, where we found a particularly impressive (and large) statue of Nebraska wildlife.

Omaha is also home to Boys Town, the famous village for underprivileged boys started by Father Flanagan decades ago. Of particular interest to us, though, is Father Flanagan’s ball of stamps–a solid ball maybe four feet in diameter that was literally made just by sticking thousands and thousands of stamps on to each other.

 

It’s the biggest ball of stamps in the world, although I tend to doubt there are too many competitors for the title. Unfortunately, visitors are not allowed to help increase its size.

 

By then it was about time to head to our hotel and get ready for Shabbat. We’re both a lot calmer, and hopefully Shabbat will give us the time and opportunity to work out exactly what happened this morning and how to move forward.

If you mention Iowa to people who live on the coasts, a stereotypical image of cornfields and small farm towns is usually what comes to mind. That image is pretty accurate.

This trip takes us completely across Iowa from east to west, and finding fun stuff to do here took a bit of creativity, and some stretching of the definition of fun. Highlights today included a really big truck stop, and you should see the ridiculous stops we’re making tomorrow on our way from Des Moines to the Nebraska border. The stuff we skipped is even stupider. One of the most recommended attractions in Iowa City is the building that used to be the state capitol back when Iowa City was the capital. And about 20 minutes off our route is a town called Riverside, which claims to be the future birthplace of Captain Kirk, despite the show never mentioning a specific hometown. We didn’t bother with those.

Somehow, though all the corn and all the corny-ness, we had a pretty great day.

A relatively light itinerary allowed us to sleep a bit later than usual. I told you yesterday that the woman at the front desk of our motel, Katie, is awesome. In my conversations with her, she recommended three things to do in the Quad Cities: the Rock Island Arsenal, John Deere, and the Skybridge. I did my best to follow her instructions.

The Arsenal is a historic and currently active army base with a museum and a National Cemetery. That sounds only mildly interesting, but I decided to trust Katie. Unfortunately, the Arsenal doesn’t ever open until noon, and that’s about the time we had to leave town. So the Arsenal was a no-go. Instead, our first stop was John Deere.

One of the Quad Cities, Moline, is the world headquarters for John Deere, and has been since John Deere himself started selling his first manual plow way back in the mid-1800s. There are three major attractions: the headquarters, the John Deere Pavillion, and the factory tour. The factory tour lets you see how they make massive combine harvesters, which sounded pretty cool to me, but Sam nixed it because, when you’ve never actually seen a real combine harvester, you don’t especially care how they’re made. Also, combines are evil in the movie Cars.

The big draw of both the headquarters and the pavilion are that they have lots of John Deere machines on display that you can climb right onto or into. We chose the pavilion because it has some interactive displays and exhibits about the company as well.

 

We were only there for about a half hour, but it was a lot of fun. Sam sat in one of the giant harvesters we didn’t see being built, as well as tractors of various sizes, a massive bulldozer, and more.

 

 

We also saw some of the stranger machines Deere makes, one of which is basically a Roomba lawn mower. The other looks like a Star Wars AT-AT whose purpose is cutting down trees rather than shooting rebels.

 

Finally it was time for the Skybridge, a one-block-long glass walkway three stories in the air that’s right on the riverfront in Davenport. Katie had recommended going to see it at night because it lights up in impressive fashion, and I was ready to go last night after we checked into the motel, but it was late and Sam was exhausted (as was I), so we left it for this morning. Even without the lights it was pretty cool.

But the best part was that we were the only ones there, with the exception of two androgynous teenagers, one of whom was sitting and watching with rapt attention as the other one showed off some sort of dance routine. We tried not to stare, but it was fantastically entertaining.

 

Our next destination was something that should never be a destination: a truck stop on I-80 in Walcott, Iowa.

What makes this one worthwhile is that, in addition to a gas station and a little mart like every other truck stop, this one has a huge auto parts store, a huge souvenir shop, a full sit-down restaurant, a laundromat, a movie theater, a barbershop, a chiropractor, and a dentist. I’m not exaggerating to be funny–it actually has all those things. It’s quite literally the biggest truck stop in the world, both by square footage and by the number of people who come through every day.

We didn’t stay long but we did enjoy ourselves. Sam joked about going to the chiropractor to fix the damage from yesterday’s off-roading. I laughed at the DVDs that were on sale: Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run, and Convoy.

Almost as exciting was when we saw a Nevada license plate in the parking lot, leaving us with only Louisiana and Hawaii still to find.

After a quick lunch and a tank of gas (a mere $1.95 per gallon!) we were back on the road, this time with the top down so we could enjoy the gorgeous blue sky as we flew down I-80 toward our next stop. The cooler stayed where we put it, and we weren’t on the highway for long before the road trip playlist gave us “Holiday Road,” the song from National Lampoon’s Vacation. We sang at the top of our lungs (it’s not that hard–the song has surprisingly few words). We joked about how appropriate it would be if Louisiana is the only license plate we don’t see, considering it’ll soon be the only state we haven’t visited. Not long after, we passed a truck with Louisiana plates.

We were in great moods when we arrived in Iowa City. We decided to skip the not-state-capitol there, so instead we went fossil hunting. The backstory is a little weird, so I’ll try to sum it up quickly. In the 80s the Army Core of Engineers built a dam on the Iowa River to protect the city from frequent floods. In 1993 there was a flood so bad that the river flowed over the dam and carried away five feet of earth on the backside of the dam. Underneath was a bed of limestone full of fossils of various small aquatic animals and plants from the Devonian period (pre-Pangaea, if I remember the informational video correctly). The state opened up the fossil gorge to the public, so anyone can just walk across the limestone, carefully inspecting its surface to see the many embedded fossils.

 

We saw some fun stuff in the limestone, and had fun exploring, but by this time it was 93 degrees and there’s no shade at the fossil gorge. By the time we got back to the car we were dripping. We drove with the roof closed and the air conditioning at full blast for the rest of the day.

Our next stop was Altoona, to see a bronze replica of one of the giant Easter Island heads. Ordinarily this would probably not be worth stopping for, but the pickings are pretty slim in central Iowa. Besides, back in my journalism days I once wrote an article about visiting Easter Island digitally, and ever since then I’ve been dying to visit in person. This might be as close as I get for a long time.

 

The maoi  was fun to see, but what really made our visit notable was the surrounding neighborhood. The statue is in a park. You know what wasn’t in the park? Any people. Any at all.

 

In fact, the entire neighborhood was completely void of people, and eerily silent. There were cars parked on the street and in driveways, and several garage doors had been left open, but nobody was outside and nobody was driving through. It was 5 p.m. on a weekday. People should have been coming home for work, running errands, playing in the park, or whatever it is that human people do in a normal suburb. The whole neighborhood looked like a movie set rather than an actual community.

 

We talked about how it felt like we were in one of those movies or TV shows where everyone dies or disappears, but the town is still standing. Then a 10-year-old boy with white hair passed by on a bicycle. The whole scene could not have been creepier. On our way out, we found three other actual humans: a high school kid carrying a baseball equipment bag, a woman getting out of a parked car, and a middle-aged man walking as if everything was normal. Sam hypothesized that aliens had landed there and abducted everyone in the town, but those four people were in the bathroom when it happened so they were left behind. That’s about as plausible an explanation as any, so that’s what we’re going with. If anyone out there has answers, I’d love to hear from you.

Finally it was time for Des Moines, the biggest city in Iowa. We had only a few things on our to-do list, though: see the state capitol (the current one, natch), visit a supposedly cool sculpture park, eat at the only kosher restaurant in Iowa, and see the triple-A Iowa Cubs take on the visiting Zephyrs.

We realized what we were in for as soon as the skyline came into view. As a New York native, I know I’m a little skyline-spoiled, but come on, Des Moines, get on your game. The whole skyline is four buildings. Three of them are rectangles.

Then we saw the capitol. Not only is it the least attractive state capitol we’ve seen (and we must’ve seen 25 or 30 by now), it’s absolutely hideous, with a gold dome surrounded by other ornate domes that look like cheap rip-offs of the Taj Mahal. We didn’t even bother getting close, because looking at it from the highway was more than enough.

 

When I was in high school, I saw a stand-up comic on TV once who joked that Des Moines is a French phrase that means “void of life.” Linguistically, he’s pretty far off, but he clearly knows Des Moines. The name actually translates as “of the monks,” but I’m more inclined to believe that they simply misspelled Des Moins, which means “of the minus.”

The kosher restaurant (a deli/mini-market combo that I’ve gotten used to seeing in smaller Jewish communities) closes at 6 p.m. on Thursdays, and that’s its late night. It was a little after 5 at this point, so we went there before the sculpture park. The deli is run by the local Chabad rabbi, and in fact he answers the phone with the greeting, “Maccabee’s Deli and Lubavitch Torah Center.” He’s a wonderfully kind and friendly guy. Not as wonderful a chef. He cooks the burgers on a George Forman Grill, if that helps give you an idea of how many Michelin stars the place has. But for the first time all week I didn’t have to cook dinner, so I was happy.

As we finished eating, I was calculating whether we had time to see the sculpture park before the game started, when I was interrupted by the rabbi, who sat down to give a brief mini-lecture about the Jewish concept of divorce and where it comes from and why the Hebrew word for divorce is “get.” It was actually pretty interesting, and the rabbi is so earnest and good-hearted that I didn’t even mind that we never made it to the sculpture park. Sam was giving me the “let’s get out of here” face the whole time, but I gave him the “too bad for you” face, and he behaved. Something tells me we’re going to remember this meal for a long time.

One of the many things I really enjoy about these trips is the interactions we have with various interesting people along the way. We’ve met some awesome people, and some complete whackjobs, and I really appreciated this rabbi. Besides, our entire meal, plus some challah and cookies for tomorrow, came to only $35, so, other than the food, what’s not to love?

When we got to the ballpark we were able to buy excellent seats in the first row, just past first base. By the time we got to our seats I figured out why such good seats were still available: a clear, dry day had suddenly turned into an intensely humid evening with increasingly ominous clouds gathering above the stadium. There couldn’t have been more than 500 fans there, which either means that most Des Moines baseball fans were in Altoona when the aliens came, or they’re smart enough to check the weather before coming to the game.

 

Thanks to our good seats and Sam’s charm, he extended his streak of getting a ball at every game before tonight’s game even started. He achieved this by slyly looking up the name of a visiting player who was stretching nearby, and then calling his name and asking for a ball. Later in the game, Sam went to the home dugout and chatted up one of the players, who gave him a (slightly cracked) game-used bat.

Meanwhile, weird stuff was happening left and right. The home team was winning, which is something we haven’t seen in person in a long time, even at home in New York. And they were taking forever to do it-the first five innings took 2.5 hours. Also, the team chose a couple of young kids to announce the batters during one inning, and that just happened to be the inning that featured the players with the toughest names. This poor seven-year-old girl had to announce Bijan Rudamacher and  Munenori Kawasaki, among others.

But the big story of the game was the weather. Those ominous clouds went away for a while once the game started, only to be replaced by clouds much darker more sinister, followed then by lots of scary lightning and thunder and, eventually, rain.

 

The rain wasn’t hard enough to stop the game, but it was hard enough to get all the fans scurrying either for covered seats or for the exits. By the time we left (in the sixth inning!) the rain had stopped but there were maybe 200 people still in the park.

And as we were leaving, a foul ball was hit right near us, scooped up by an usher, and put right into Sam’s hands. The kid has a knack.

 

 

 

Four years ago today, on our first cross-country road trip, The Hamster and I were passengers in a dune buggy that sped up and down massive sand hills in Oregon. It was and absolutely thrilling adrenaline rush, and one of the top highlights of the trip.

Purely by coincidence, we marked the anniversary today by doing an even better version of the same thing. On the outskirts of Attica, Indiana–a Western Indiana town so small that our GPS thinks its streets are private property–lies Badlands Off-Road Park, one of the most fun places I’ve ever visited and absolutely something we can’t do at home. It’s an 800-acre playground for ATVs, with sand dunes, wooded areas, rocky moguls, a stream, steel tunnels–pretty much every terrain you can imagine, with hundreds of paths intersecting through it all like spiderwebs on crack.

We woke up very early so we could be there when the park opened. We rented a two-seater and a couple of helmets, got a quick tutorial that included instructions on how to make sure your thumbs don’t get ripped off (I swear I’m not making that up), and off we went,climbing through twisting, rutted pathways, flying over dunes, and  splashing through puddles. It was terrifying, it was muddy beyond anything I had imagined, and it was SO MUCH FUN!

As long as your thumbs don’t get ripped off,  pretty much anything goes within the park. No section is off-limits, and everything is multidirectional. I asked if there were any speed limits, and the answer was, “There are a few signs posted in the park, but they’re just suggestions. You can go whatever speed you’re comfortable with.”

At first I took it very slow as I got used to the machine and the terrain. Slowly Sam and I both started getting a little more confident and adventurous. By 10 a.m. we were zipping up and down terrifyingly steep dunes at 30 mph, splashing back and forth across a shallow stream, and trying out more and more challenging paths.

Eventually our confidence got the better of us. We were speed across dunes at one point when we came upon a section of moguls. I didn’t slow down. In seconds we were being bounced so violently that I was sure the vehicle would flip over. I hit the brakes, relieved that we didn’t flip, but we got bounced around so badly that Sam was in a lot of pain. We’re not sure if his back slammed against something hard in the vehicle or if it just hurt from all the bouncing, but he was in tears. He calmed down pretty quickly, got out and stretched, and slowly started to feel better. But we were a lot more tentative and careful for the rest of our time there.

We could have stayed all day–most people do, and the counter staff looked pretty surprised when we returned the helmets and vehicle at around noon. But we had a busy day ahead of us, and I had a lot of normal, paved driving to do.

On the way to our next stop we crossed over into the Central Time Zone and thus gained an hour, which was good because we had an absolutely packed day planned, and also because we reversed our maturity by several years simply by where we chose to go next: Kickapoo State Park.

We didn’t even want to do anything in the park. We just wanted to kick a poo. Or at least go somewhere that instructs all visitors to do so. Yes, it’s stupid and childish, but let me remind you that Sam spent half of yesterday giggling about the name Dick Butkus. You have to know your audience.

 

When we left Kickapoo we put the top down so we could enjoy the beautiful weather. The drive to our next destination was about 40 minutes, and about halfway there our hunger got the best of us and Sam turned around to grab some snacks from the back seat. That was when he screamed, “Dad! The cooler! The top is gone!”

I took a glance behind me and saw our cooler with its lid off. It took a second to dawn on me that the lid was not just open, but completely gone. I pulled onto the shoulder and stopped the car, not knowing what to do next. The first thing we did was to check the contents of the cooler, which were thankfully all still there. We quickly realized that the wind must have somehow opened the cooler and then yanked the lid completely off and out of the car. We guessed that it happened about 15 miles or so earlier,  when the wind picked up just as we got onto the Interstate. But we had no way of knowing whether we were right, and whether the lid had already been crushed to bits by a passing truck. And no way to keep our food cold. On the bright side, our cooler was now qualified to work at the topless club that was next to our motel the previous night. But we had a serious problem to solve.

One of the keys to a successful road trip is flexibility and problem solving, because there are always things that don’t go according to plan and there are always problems that arise along the way. We’ve gotten very good as solving them, whether it’s finding supplies we suddenly need or reworking our itinerary to fit in fewer or more activities as necessary. And that’s good, because a lot of little things have gone stupidly wrong for us on this trip already, and it’s only been a few days.

On day two, for example, the cigarette lighter in our car stopped working, which means we can’t charge our phones while we drive. So we use portable chargers as needed, and charge everything overnight in our motel room. But then on day three I left my phone charger in our motel room. So I Frankensteined a new charger out of an iPhone wall cube and the cable from the car charger I can’t use. Problem solved.

Back to the topless cooler. As we closed the roof, we took a moment to mourn the cooler that had been with us on every road trip, and we started trying to figure out how to get a new cooler right away.

Wal-Mart to the rescue. Sam checked on his phone and found a Wal-Mart in the same town we were headed. We went straight there, and managed to solve a few nagging problems all at once. We found a cooler roughly the same size and shape as the old one, and we also picked up a few other important item’s we’ve been missing. I had realized day earlier that I had forgotten to pack our hot plate, which is an essential tool if you need to heat up food in a hotel room on the Sabbath. Not worry–we bought a new one at Wal-Mart. And we also realized on our first day that we forgot to bring stamps, which are essential if you plan to mail your daughter a postcard every day. They sell those at Wal-Mart, too, so Sam’s sister is going to be getting a serious stack of postcards very soon.

In the parking lot I quickly got to work transferring all our food from the old, topless cooler to the new one.I left the old cooler in the parking lot next to a garbage can. It looked so sad as we drove away, but it’s somehow fitting that our road trip cooler ends up at the Wal-Mart in Rantoul, Illinois. He died the way he lived.

In a few minutes we were on our way, problems solved and ready for more fun.

Fun is exactly what we got. Hardy’s Reindeer Ranch is really in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farmland for miles in every direction. And after seeing nothing but cornfields for a while, it was an oasis of eclectic kitch and wacky fun. The reindeer are only one of the attractions at Hardy’s. There’s also a massive corn maze, a pumpkin patch, a small playground, and the most fun bathroom I’ve ever seen.

 

The reindeer were incredibly friendly, and in a few moments Sam had them literally eating out of his hand.

 

Their antlers are covered with fur at the moment, but Hardy told us that they’ll rub the fur off by rubbing against tree limbs when the weather gets cooler. We also learned that reindeer make a clicking sound when they walk (even on grass), and that their docile behavior is pretty similar to that of cow, even though they’re more closely related to deer. These particular reindeer are originally from Alaska (or at least their grandparents were), but they have clearly acclimated well to Illinois.

In the souvenir shop, we bought a postcard for Abby, which we can now mail.

Our next stop was even more fun: a museum of classic arcade games and pinball machines from the 80s and 90s.

 

It’s cool to see the games, but what really makes the place worthy of inclusion on our trip is that you can play every game in there, and they all cost the same quarter per game that they cost when I was a kid.

I put a $20 in the change machine and I figured we’d spend a half hour there, maybe an hour. But we both got wrapped up and were having so much fun that we completely lost track of time. I played several rounds of Tapper, the game where you control an old-timey bartender who has to serve mugs of beer to a bunch of customers at once. Then I hit Burger Time, one of my childhood favorites. A bunch of quarters later, I had made it onto the high score board, in the number 4 spot.

 

I also spent some time on Donkey Kong, which was much harder than I remember it being, and Galaga, which I still don’t know how to pronounce. On that one I was more successful, setting a new high score for the machine.

 

Meanwhile, Sam tried his hand at a bunch of slightly more modern games before settling down at The Simpsons, where he, too, set the new high score.

Bored with his own mastery, he checked out the Wurlitzer jukebox and dropped a quarter in.

 

When I heard the machine whirring and dropping the tiny record into place I wondered what song he possibly could have picked. The answer: “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles. I laughed. He laughed. He didn’t pick the song because he likes it, he picked it to be ironic. But since we were the only people in there at the time, we both sang along.

Before we knew it, two hours had passed. And we still had quarters! We still had several stops to make, so we left, driving for just 10 minutes this time to nearby Atlanta, Illinois to see our old friend Paul Bunyan.

 

We’ve seen a few Paul Bunyans on our road trips, and we’re going to see at least one more before we’re back home. But the hot dog makes this one stand out. If his hands look a bit odd, it’s because the original statue was made to hold an ax. This particular one was bought by a restaurant owner, who decided that Paul was hungry. Even more interesting was that, when we got there, we realized that the statue is on Route 66, which cuts through Atlanta.

 

I spent the next half hour or so trying to figure out how we missed this one when we drove Route 66 two years ago. But we didn’t stay long, because a giant rooster was waiting for us in Peoria.

After spending most of the day driving past cornfield after cornfield in the most picturesque farmland, it was kind of nice to finally see an actual city. But we soon discovered that the word “city” grossly overstates Peoria’s geopolitical status. It’s basically just a large collection of churches and urban blight. Seriously, I’ve never seen so many churches in one place. And in one of the many run-down neighborhoods we drove through, a drunk guy on the porch of his dilapidated house yelled at me for making a K turn so that I could pull into the $3 car wash across the street. On the plus side, we got a car wash for $3.

The most popular attraction in Peoria is the Visitors Center at the headquarters of Caterpillar, the construction equipment company. But there’s no factory tour there, just a bunch of Caterpillar vehicles on display. So we decided to skip the big name attraction in favor of more oddities. First up was a giant rooster wearing a top hat.

 

The rooster is there to call attention to Carl’s Bakery, which appears to be significantly less formal that its inexplicably dapper mascot.

After the rooster we headed to another of Peoria’s top attractions, a really big oak tree. Seriously. That’s a thing. In fairness to Peoria, the tree is truly hunormous.

 

But still, it’s an oak tree. And it’s in a park named … wait for it … Giant Oak Park.

When we returned to the car from looking at an oak tree, I notice the newest problem on our trip: our front license plate was half off, being held on by only one screw. We immediately surmised that it must have been knocked loose during the $3 car wash. I started to worry about the one remaining screw giving way once we got back on the Interstate, and thought about taking it off entirely if only to avoid losing it forever. But upon closer inspection I was relieved to see that the missing screw was not missing at all–the plate had just slipped off of it somehow. This was about the time I started patting myself on the back for keeping a mini-screwdriver on my key ring. All I had to do was take out the screw, put the plate back in place, and put the screw back in–nice and tight this time. Another problem, another solution.

We also found a solution for our distaste for Peoria: the perfectly named Grandview Ave, a street that meanders through an extremely posh neighborhood, giving joggers, dog walkers, and drivers like us stunning views of the Illinois River on one side, and almost-as-stunning views of several beautiful mansions on the other side.

 

Better yet, instead of park benches scattered along the river side, there are picnic tables, giving us a perfect place to have dinner. The view from our dinner table was a whole lot nicer than the trucks in the background at most rest stops.

 

Dinner, by the way, was another triumph. Our food stayed cold all day in the new cooler, and along with our grilled burgers, we had fresh corn that I had bought at a little farm stand we passed while on our way from the arcade museum and the Paul Bunyan statue.

 

We left Peoria on a good note and headed for Iowa. The plan was to find a place to stay in Quad Cities, four small cities right on the border (two in Illinois and two in Iowa). Shocking both of us, this turned out to be a huge win, as the Econo Lodge in Bettendorf, Iowa is far nicer than any Econo Lodge has a right to be–especially for $63 a night. The woman at the front desk, Katie, is my new best friend, and gave me some great advice on what to do while we’re in town. And there’s an elevator! The funniest part is that, in addition to an indoor pool, there’s also a game room with a pool table and several arcade games, including Ms. Pac-Man. Sam and I were tempted, but we got pretty spoiled paying 25 cents per game in McLean, so we decided to just stay in our room and get some sleep. Despite the near-disasters, the day was perfect as is.

 

 

The Hamster and I are not racing fans. We never watch racing on TV, and we pay little attention to who wins even the biggest races. When Helio Castroneves was on Dancing With the Stars we had no idea who he was, and complained to no one in particular that the show had too many nonfamous “celebrities.” The only reason I know anything about racing at all is because I used to be a sportswriter and felt an obligation to at least keep up with the basics.

Still, when we decided to include Indianapolis in this trip, the first thing that came to mind was Indianapolis Motor Speedway, also known as the Brickyard, the home of the famous Indianapolis 500.

 

There’s an impressive museum there that houses dozens of cars that have won the Indy 500 over the years, including the very first winner in 1911, as well as last year’s winner.

 

And we got pretty lucky, because we had exactly enough time to wander through the museum before the next “Kiss the Bricks” tour, a guided tour of the track that drives you around the track on a small tour bus and then lets you get out at the finish line.

 

It’s called “Kiss the Bricks” because the racetrack was paved with bricks for decades, and the original bricks are still underneath the asphalt that covers the track now. At the finish line, there’s a thin strip of original brick exposed, and it’s a tradition for the winner of every race to kneel down and kiss the bricks.

 

The tour was short but very informative. We learned about the origins of the tradition for the Indy 500 winner to drink a jug of milk, and that each driver in the race is asked ahead of time what type of milk he’d like if he ends up in the winner’s circle. We learned that the guy who developed the racetrack is the same guy who developed Miami Beach. We learned that there’s a professional golf course that overlaps the Brickyard, with 14 holes just outside the track and 4 holes on the infield.

 

 

We also thought it was pretty cool that the museum is located on the infield as well, which means that we got to drive down under the stands to get there, and we were surrounded by the track in every direction.

Another perk of the museum was that it attracts racing fans from all over the country. By the time we left, Sam had found a few more state license plates and has now seen 46. (He’s missing only Hawaii, Nevada, Mississippi, and Louisiana. We’ve also seen Ontario, Canada, and Chihuahua, Mexico.)

Meanwhile, the weather this morning was so beautiful that we drove with the top down for the first time on this trip. But by the time we left the Speedway it was close to 90 degrees. This made a significant impact on our day and our moods, but I’ll get to that later.

Next up was the historic Lockerbie Square neighborhood near downtown Indianapolis. A mistake Sam made entering in the coordinates into the GPS sent us almost half an hour in the wrong direction, but we corrected the mistake and were soon glad that we visited the neighborhood. It’s adorable, with the most charming houses and blocks we’ve seen outside of Savannah.

 

After a few minutes soaking up the charm of Lockerbie, we headed downtown for a bunch of monuments. As a city, Indianapolis has kind of a fun spirit, but a lot of its beauty comes from stunning but somber memorials to those who died in various wars. The biggest of these is the Indiana War Monument,  which looks a bit like the Washington Monument’s overweight brother.

 

It’s got more steps than Rocky can handle, so we were pretty winded when we reached the top of the main stairs. At that point, visitors can enter the monument and head up to the observation deck at the very top for panoramic views of the city–but not on Mondays or Tuesdays. Grrr. Still, we had pretty impressive views from the top of the main stairs.

At this point I was reminded of Paris. Directly to the north and south are parks and stately government buildings, reminiscent of the views from the Eiffel Tower.

 

The French influence is also evident at the state capitol, especially in the design of the corners of the roof.

 

The capitol is beautiful, and significantly larger than Ohio’s. But there were two other things that made our trip there particularly enjoyable. First, we got a metered parking spot right in front of the building. More interesting, though, was when we met this man:

 

He was sitting in a pickup truck nearby and got excited when he saw us taking pictures of the capitol. He bounded out of the car while declaring “Right on!” and then proceeded to tell me about his heritage (he’s part Cherokee and part German), his upbringing (his mother was a good mom but a wild woman), the fact that law enforcement removed his ankle monitor yesterday, and also that he paid attention in school, so he knows that the statues just under the roof are of Daniel Boone and his family and Geronimo and his family.

 

 

Did I mention that he introduced himself as Wolfman? Sorry, I probably should have led with that.

When I finally shook free of Wolfman, we walked a couple of blocks to the “ndy” statue so we could be the “I” in Indy, as the slogan says.

 

A couple more blocks brought us to Monument Circle to see another gorgeous (and French-inspired) monument to the fallen:

 

This one also has an observation deck with incredible views–or so I’m told. This one is also closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so we didn’t get to see for ourselves.

Frustrated and exhausted from the heat, Sam was pretty cranky and rude. I was frustrated and overheated myself, and let him know pretty clearly that I didn’t appreciate his attitude. The day almost ended there, but our next stop was indoors, so we headed back to the car for some air conditioning and a short drive to White River State Park in hopes of perking up our day.

Within the park are several well-reviewed museums, but the only one that interested us is the NCAA Hall of Champions, which is basically the college sports hall of fame. It was pretty underwhelming, as the museum part was incredibly basic and the interactive part had many nonworking exhibits. However, while perusing the biggest NCAA honorees throughout the years, Sam saw the name Dick Butkus and completely lost it. He was laughing so hard that I was glad we hadn’t had any victory milk at the Brickyard because it would’ve been coming out of his nose. The whole rest of the day he’d randomly start giggling and say “Dick Butkus.” From that moment on he was in a good mood. He even gave a moving press conference in which he thanked Dick Butkus multiple times.

 

Our final activity was thankfully right next door. A canal runs through a swath of downtown Indianapolis, and it’s surrounded on both sides by Canal Walk, an absolutely breathtaking walkway with footbridges, benches, restaurants, and all sorts of wonderful touches.

We were too hot and tired to explore on foot as we had originally planned, so I caved in to Sam’s begging and rented one of those ridiculous, touristy family bicycles that look like an old-timey car.

 

Sam was thrilled, and we both had a great time enjoying the scenery from our silly car-bike.

Canal Walk features multiple fountains, and the walls beneath every footbridge are painted with murals, each more impressive than the next.

 

Our only complaint was the throngs of people staring at their phones as they chased after Pokémon, oblivious to the beauty surrounding them.

 

When we returned the bike we had a little surprise: my brother, Sam’s Uncle Steve!

 

Steve is a comedian based in Los Angeles but he’s on the road pretty often, so it’s especially rare and serendipitous that we happened to be in the same city at the same time. We hung out for a bit in the park before heading our separate ways.

We headed west out of town, stopping only to grill a couple of steaks at a rest stop along I-74.

 

 

Even as we mock the Pokémon Go players, Sam has been on a hunt of his own, checking for and finding geocaches in some pretty odd places. He tends to look for them while we’re not doing anything else, like when we’re sitting down to dinner, and apparently rest stops are a hotbed of geocaches. Tonight he found a particularly cool one at the rest stop: a hole at the base of a tree that contained a small plastic container of toys. He took a little toy truck and a superball, leaving the rest of the loot for the next person who finds it, and then promptly lost the superball in the grass before we made it back to the car.

We ended up at a particularly disappointing Ramada in Crawfordsville, Indiana, for the night. Not that I expect much from a Ramada, there are crappy motels and then there are crappy motels. The first sign that a motel is extra crappy is that the doors to the rooms are on the outside of the building. Every motel I’ve ever stayed in has either put the door to my room indoors, or outdoors. The Ramada in Crawfordsville has both. So whoever is planning to break into our room and murder us tonight has a choice of how to do it.

Once I saw the outside doors, I knew I had to lower my expectations, but I was still hoping at least for a vanity around the sink that doesn’t have garbage on it from the previous guest.

 

What’s that on the vanity? Look closer: it’s a French fry.

And there you have it: the French influence is officially everywhere.