Tuesday, June 20th 2023

Starting Mileage: 3530, distance travelled: 525

Today we drove 525 miles through three states and saw quite a few cool things on the way. There was no state line sign entering Illinois but we did catch a shot of the Chicago skyline and Guaranteed Rate Field (home of the White Sox). We are finally west of the Mississippi River!

172 miles in we stopped at the worlds largest Culver’s for lunch and had some of their signature frozen custard before heading out again and driving another 253 miles to a secret surprise.

SPAM MUSEUM!!

This was the funniest surprise ever and it contained the entire history of Spam.

After our little adventure through spam land we visited a veterans memorial down the street in Austin, MN. We drove another 100 miles to Jackson, MN, ate dinner at Kat’s Hog Heaven, and stayed the night at a KOA campground. David is still testing positive so Laura continues to be relegated to her under-the-bed sleeping quarters. Let’s just say the novelty has worn off after 4 nights…but she’s been a trooper.

We’ve been listening to musicians from the states we are driving through. On our way through Minnesota, David rocked out to some classic Dylan.

Monday, June 19, 2023

Starting mileage: 3182, distance travelled: 348

we’re in Indiana dunes. Our first national park on this trip! We also got our national park passports, and my VIP 4th grade membership card. Free national parks yay!

NEW CAMPGROUND!

Apparently there are chickens who like pulled pork sandwiches. They also like stealing things from people.

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Starting mileage: 2883, distance travelled: 299

We woke up relatively early, just east of Buffalo, ready to head to Cuyahoga Valley National Park to get our National Park passport and check off our first park. After waking David up with some bad motel coffee for Father’s Day, we got on the road. We didn’t get more than 10 miles Dow the road before our plans changed. Niagara Falls State Park was only 15 miles north of Buffalo, so to the Falls we went.

Maple Lake Campground

We left Niagara around 1pm, drove through the northern tip of Pennsylvania, then into Ohio to get to Seville, just west of Akron and north of Wooster, where David went to college and his family comes from.

The campground had a pool and we had a lovely evening, swimming, having dinner and exploring the campground. Check out gallery view below.

David still positive

We had to get creative with sleeping arrangements because there were no trees to be found to set up the hammock tent for David to isolate outside. Laura volunteered to sleep in the little cave created under the bed and David got the pop-up to himself.

Saturday, June 17, 2023

Starting mileage: 2544, distance travelled: 399

And we’re off! It’s 3pm on Saturday, June 17 and we are on the road. After a brief delay (about 24 hours) due to a bout with COVID for David and Susan, we are on our way west. The plan is to get some mileage behind us today and stay in separate hotel rooms to give David one more day to test fully negative.

We stopped for dinner at Chik-fil-A at a New York Thruway rest stop.

Hotel rooms were pretty booked up around Buffalo and we had to pay for two rooms so we stayed on the cheap at a pretty sketchy place off the highway in Batavia, NY. They gave us adjoining rooms but when we got upstairs, it slowly dawned on the kids and Susan that they were in a room that someone was already staying in! They freaked out, ran into dad’s room, and only after Susan got a different room did they realize that, in the hurry to vacate the occupied room, someone grabbed the guy’s bag. Now Susan had to return to the front desk a third time to explain…epic fail! It’s surprising how disturbing it is to be in someone else’s room…at least they weren’t in there when we came barging in like we owned the place!