Wawa

This is the coolest convenience store ever! They get a PB (pee break) rating of 9. Clean bathrooms. Non obnoxious music. Lots of choices of good products. Great customer service!

You know you're in PA when you see...

we are in this crazy doll store. this wizard of oz doll set is $3,200!!!

Fog ahead

I don't know if you can see, but there is lots of fog billowing around the car. I'm sure glad I'm not driving! We are driving through(or is it OVER) the Appalachian Mountains. It is very cool but not too cold, and thankfully, it isn't raining right now! We spent the last week in Motels because of the rain. Now we are planning to stop in Lancaster County, PA to have one last touristy experience before going home. I'll take pictures if I can! It is home to the Amish community. who live in a very separate, different way than we do. Google it. They are very interesting!

One scrambled egg and 'taylor ham'

Homeward Bound

This is technically the second sign for home but they were about 50 feet apart.

Silver linings and the like

There's always something good to find in the world. Junky as this weather is, I looked up(I am NOT driving) to see a lovely rainbow in the sky. Can you see it on my picture I took with my camera phone?

Lincoln you say?

yet more

More Interesting Illinois pictures

Guess Where We Are?

cheeeeeeeeeese!

Wisconsin cheese. Need I say more? We stopped at a place to sample stuff but they weren't very friendly(and you couldn't buy less than a pound).

This is at Pioneer Village. Harold Warp collected all the stuff that is there. The theme of the place is Man's Progress. It's really cool. We took two days to see it and didn't get bored, only a little hot and tired. It's certainly a well priced tourist attraction; the 15 dollar campsite came with a free ticket (worth 9.50)!

Wisconsin

This is the capitol building in Madison, WISCONSIN.

Iowa

The pictures I will be posting are in no particular order. Now that I'm in range I want to send some of the pictures that are on my phone! This is in Iowa. I just thought it was cool that it was called Cornhusker Highway!

Randomness #3

Oh, man!! Poor planning on my part!
I thought we'd be in chicago by now so we weren't planning on going to Minneapolis over the weekend. We will be going to the Mall Of America on a SATURDAY! Right before school starts! Well, school started already out here but you get the idea. It's going to be crowded and crazy. I hope it is still fun and not too stressful. Cross your fingers that my cousin in Chicago gets back to me; as we move west things are getting EXPENSIVE! Especially camping and motels and such.
The campground we are at tonight is not so great. It has a pool and wifi and all that but the sites are TINY &crowded together. There is absolutely no privacy. We are RIGHT behind the rear of a huge RV. Blech. &we are tired and cranky &I don't think either of us feels like cooking. Well we could have tuna sandwiches or cereal. Tuna sounds pretty good.

MORE LATER!

Friday august 17

Last night we stayed with a cousin in Ames, Iowa. That was fun. We got to get to know her and her three kids a little. We are headed north, firstly because we are wimping out from the heat, which is a good excuse to go back and spend more time in Minnesota. We decided to go ahead and go to the Mall Of America. Neither of us is big on shopping but it is sure something to see! And they have rides! And a "whimsical fountain" where they do animatronic light and music shows. This will also hopefully give us a chance to hear from family in Chicago. We really want to go there, but camping's difficult in big cities, and motels are going to be expensive. So we hope to stay with family. If we haven't heard from them tmw maybe we will go check out Madison, Wisconsin! Today for lunch we bought corn from a roadside stand and boiled it! It was good but not as good as the ones in nebraska that we
roasted in the fire.

6:30 am Lander Wyoming

Sometimes it's worth getting up early to see a sunrise!

Randomness #2

We stayed in Omaha, NE last night, after spending two days at Pioneer Village in Minden, NE. That was lots of fun. I am meeting family I didn't know existed! We are off to Ames, IA to meet(and stay with) another cousin. It is so cool to find out you have family everywhere! We just stopped at the Iowa Visitors Center which also had a Historical Village. I love these oddball collections of old timey things from arrowheads to old farm equipment to ladies fashion over the years. We had lunch at a place called RUNZA which is a Nebraska tradition, which sells pocket sandwiches made from sourdough bread. Yum. We hope to have some yummy corn products while we're in Iowa, since they seem to be advertising and promoting corn all over the place.
We're still figuring out where to go next, since we decided against our impulse, which was to go north to the mall of america, purely for the A/C and the roller coaster. We'll probably drive towards Chicago.

Random Bits Of thoughts

I have been taking pictures &video and writing lots and sending it all to blogger. Turns out that while I'm in "extended network" I can't send picture or video messages! The same for VZ Navigator, which is the really neat GPS system verizon offers. Neat when it works, of course. So, like I said before, pictures will come later. Ah well. We walked around Independence Rock yesterday and saw the signatures of settlers that came across in wagons a hundred and sixty years ago! Original graffiti artists. We walked around the whole thing! It was a hundred and seven degrees. We were so thirsty we both drank two whole gat*orades when we got back in the car. Now we just left Carhenge. Before that we were at Scott's Bluff. Cool rocks! Now we are on to Minden, NE, to stay at Pioneer Village. We might drive on till it's dark just to escape the heat!

Life Is Good.

I am sitting in a camp chair and it is dark, with the exception of the campfire. I have eaten two smores(w/70% dark chocolate!) and one bloated, toasty leftover Easter Peep. The wind and the creek are gently rustling and J is writing postcards by a flashlight. I have written some but not sent them. Addresses are in somewheresville. Today was a really excellent day. We hung out @the local cafe w/locals. We relaxed. We were tourists. We did laundry. We ate a great meal cooked over the fire. Tomorrow we head to Independence Rock. That's where all the folks heading to Oregon in wagons in the olden days would stop and etch their names in the rock before heading on. I am learning so much on this trip! From air pressure to how rocks are formed to history of the pioneers. I love this trip.

This is a test post. This is the laundrymat(spelled like that!) where we did clothes and got online. The kids that were all over the place and touching my stuff and asking a million questions got into a car with their mom; 7ish year old holding a baby in the front passenger seat. I wanted to write the license plate down and call someone. I didn't. What would YOU do? All of a sudden the kid's boundary issues didn't seem like suchv a big deal. Now we are waiting bc there's nobody here and we want the $3.80 that is left on this card!! Wasting good daylight hours &will have to cook in the dark. I hate that!

We are in Lander, Wyoming. We've seen lots of pioneer museums and living recreations of history of the Oregon Trail. We watched a cool movie at the museum narrated by a ten year old character who described crossing the country in a covered wagon. Obviously, it was fiction!!!

We are staying at a campground called POPO AGIE CAMPGROUND which is pronounced some odd way that I already forgot. It's at the bottom of a canyon with a creek rushing by our campsite.

We stopped at the local independent bookstore and ended up sitting at the cafe for hours talking to the people that worked there. One of them was a young guy who also works at the Pioneer Museum, so he gave us some local recommendations. He said, "Before I leave, let me show you a magic trick". Turned out he was an AMAZING magician! We ought to have taken pictures. He was brilliant. He gave us his card and I will email him and thank him for the wonderful show. One of those guys that just seems to be brilliant at everything.

Tonight we will be grilling on the fire and doing smores. Wheee!!!!

Now I can post from my phone so hopefully I will be doing it more often. I am right now at a laundromat next to a small child who was watching Spongebob and coming way closer to me and asking me way more questions than I, a New Yorker, am comfortable with!

Oh, great. I thought the Spongebob marathon was bad- somehow the kid got the remote and put on something scary and gory!!! His brother is shouting, CHANGE IT!!! CHANGE IT!!! And I am telling him it's even too scary for ME.

Oh, good. Cartoons again. At least they're just ANNOYING, not inappropriate, and I'm outta here, anyway!

Greetings and Salutations From Wyoming!!!!

first text post

This is my first post from my phone.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We are having a hard time deciding where to go as we leave the West Coast. Do we take 80 through Nevada, which will be fast but ultimately boring, or head for Brice and Zion National parks which will be very beautiful, but HOT...

We stayed last night (and will stay tonight) with friends who took great care of us! They fixed us a lovely meal of roast chicken, vegetables from their garden, and a homemade berry/peach crisp with local vanilla ice cream to go with. We played with their GIGANTIC 8 month old baby, who seems very advanced both motor skills-wise and mentally.

This morning they made us french toast out of cinnamon bread and we had more of that great west coast coffee... Yum....

We may or may not go sightsee San Francisco. We're broke and tired and might just want to get an oil change and rest. I wanted to see a friend today who lives here in the Bay Area and makes these amazing mosaics. Later I will create a link to her website since they are so beautiful. But she does not seem to be answering my text messages.

Thank heaven for cell phones. They've saved us from some jams on this trip!

J finally read the last Harry Potter, so I can talk about it! Yay!

If I don't get to post for the next few days it probably means that we are in an area with limited internet, which is surprisingly, a lot of this country! It's amazing how narrow my view is of the country, living in New York. I think things stay open late (that's been a big shocker!!), I will find a wide variety of products available, which I sometimes do and sometimes don't... It's hard to find a rhyme or reason to that one. The convenience store right outside Yellowstone just happened to be amazingly diverse- all kinds of natural products and organic and everything.

I really thought I'd be getting online ALL THE TIME. Some days it has just been that we've been traveling all day and it just isn't a priority to stop and do email stuff. Sometimes I want to and there's nothing for miles and miles. For that matter, sometimes there isn't even food or GAS for a super long time, so I'm extra grateful for our Bin Of Snacks. Nothing in there is so delicious that I want to gobble it all up in one sitting, with the exception of the freeze dried fruit, so I know there are peanut butter crackers or fig newtons or whatever for when we just want to keep driving instead of stop to eat, or if there's nothing that grabs us.

We've managed to stick to the rule of no national chains. Other than ONE dalliance and Dairy Queen, everything we've eaten has been local, mostly independently owned, and quite often on the west coast, organic. We've been pretty lucky!

Our friends have been such awesome hosts. I confess that I've started rating them for things like Best Sleeping Accommodations or Best Food or in the case of the place we're at now- Cutest Baby. I think this place takes the ribbon in SEVERAL categories.

The car is getting hard to manage with all th junk we're accumulating. I've gotten a lot of hand me downs, including four pairs of shoes and a few shirts! I suggested mailing stuff home but that just seemed to get complicated.

So, on we go. We'd really like to see Carhenge (google it) but we'd also like to see Pioneer Village, which is on the other side of the state. I'd like to eat a really great steak. Thoughts? Where would YOU go from herE?