Category: Road trips

Kearney, Nebraska, to Rock Springs, Wyoming

By the time we got to the Wyoming border, Carol said she was ready to leave Nebraska. I didn’t say so, but I enjoyed the drive through Nebraska. Near Kearney, I liked the way the highway followed the broad flat valley of the Platte River, every so often crossing over one channel of the river or another, passing between green fields of corn and hay fields and lines of trees along the river channels and the very occasional small city. As we got further west, we saw fewer and fewer trees, and more cattle, and here and there a field of golden wheat. The land gradually rose up and up until we were in the high plains, and most of the land was range land. Now and again we passed cattle, mostly clustered around stock ponds in the heat of the day, and I thought about the story that I had read in yesterday’s issue of the Kearney Hub — “125th year, 230th issue”; “At the center of Nebraska life since 1888” — that told how the U.S. Farm Service is going to allow “emergency grazing on about 900,000 acres in Nebraska because of the ongoing lack of forage for livestock”; Western Nebraska is one of the regions where emergency grazing will be allowed, for conditions continue to be drier than normal, even though “conditions appeared to improve at the beginning of the year.”

Once we got into Wyoming, the scenery did get more dramatic. Not long after we passed over the border, we saw sagebrush growing by the side of the highway, and not long after that we saw our first oil derrick bobbing slowly up and down, and then we caught our first sight of tall mountains in the blue distance. We drove past strange rock formations, and watched the railroad wind its way around the sides of hills and buttes. The railroad reminded me of something we saw yesterday: As we drove out of Yankton, South Dakota, before we crossed over the Missouri River on U.S. Route 81, we had to stop at a railroad crossing for two Union Pacific trains to go by; the train headed west consisted of a long line of empty hopper cars, and the train headed east consisted of a long line of hopper cars filled with coal; I suspected that the coal came from the huge Powder River Basin mines on federal lands in Wyoming, since something like eighty train loads of coal come out of Powder River Basin each day.

We stopped in Laramie to visit the food coop there, and stock up on good food. We happened to arrive just when the farmer’s market was taking place, so we wandered around, talking to people in the various booths. Carol got a small bag of summer apples, and some spinach. I got some raw honey and a loaf of olive bread. Carol got some raspberry leaf tea, and an inexpensive necklace made out of a seashell by the nice young man who sold it to her. I found Second Story Books in the next block, browsed for a while, and came away with a biography of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and a book published by the University of Nebraska Press written by a man who had traveled all over the Great Plains for several months, stopping in small towns and talking with whoever came his way. We finally made it to Big Hollow Coop. The man who took our money was from Jackson, California, and had come to Laramie because his girlfriend was in graduate school there. He told us that Big Hollow is the only coop in the whole state, which surprised me; I expected that there would at least be one in Cheyenne.

We stopped to eat our dinner at a highway rest area outside Laramie. It was very windy, but the picnic table had brick walls surrounding three sides, and a wooden roof, so we could shelter from the wind. A pair of Barn Swallows was also taking shelter in the picnic, and they had built their nest up in the rafters; I could just see one swallow’s tail projecting out a little beyond the mud walls of the nest.

We stopped just before sunset at a parking area just before the exit for Creston Junction, Wyoming, and got out to stretch our cramped legs. We looked out over the sagebrush tinged gold by the setting sun, the mountains in the distance now turning pink and purple, the picturesque white clouds — and I realized something out in the sagebrush was looking at me. “See that?” I said to Carol. “An antelope.” She spotted two more. One of them looked at us, saw that we were too far away to be a threat, grazed on some sagebrush, and began moving west; the other two were also moving west, heading towards the setting sun.

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Yankton, South Dakota, to Kearney, Nebraska

After we ate breakfast, Carol and her aunt wanted to spend the morning talking about family. I went for a walk along the Auld-Brokaw bike path in Yankton. It was pleasant enough when you could feel the wind, but when I got to the Yankton high school, the path was in the lee of a hill, and there was no breeze at all, and it was quite hot. I was glad to get back to Carol’s aunt’s tree-shaded house. But she and her aunt were deep in family recollections, and I decided to visit the National Music Museum, which was just a few miles away.

The National Music Museum is housed on the campus of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. I found a shady parking place down the street, and walked in. The pleasant woman at the front desk told me there was an audio tour available, but I said I only had an hour, and pretty much knew what I wanted to see. It took me a few minutes — I kept getting distracted by all the amazing and beautiful instruments on display — but pretty soon I found the mountain dulcimer made by J. E. Thomas in Kentucky in 1912. I had seen the instrument on their online checklist, and was pretty sure they would display an instrument by the traditional builder who had perhaps the greatest influence on the revival of the mountain dulcimer. Their instrument has some damage — it has a small crack in the soundboard, and one of the sides has separated from the soundboard at the lower bout — but it is still a good example of how Thomas made his instruments. I paid particular attention to the flat grain of the soundboard; the way the outer strings bore against the sides of the pegbox; the frets made of wire staples; the wooden nut and bridge. While well-made, this is a folk instrument, not a finely-crafted product of a luthier’s shop.

I also noticed a square piano made by John Osborne of Boston about 1824. I noticed this instrument because it had come from the Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, as a transfer in 2012. The Rotch-Jones-Duff House had been refining its collection while I lived in New Bedford, and presumably the curators either decided that this piano had no real connection to the house, or that they couldn’t adequately care for it. In any case, it has found a lovely home, and it now stands back to back with another square piano from a different Boston piano maker of the early nineteenth century, allowing people to compare subtle details of the cabinetry between two similar instruments.

I tore myself away from the National Music Museum. I could have spent several more hours there, looking at all kinds of instruments: novelty ukuleles; an original theremin; tools, molds, jigs, and benches from a guitar maker’s shop; the same from a luthier’s shop; clavichords; serpents; an epinette des Vosges; a trumpet marine; an 1850s Martin guitar; etc. On my way out, I talked briefly with the woman at the front desk, and she said the museum hosts weekly concerts when school is in session, occasionally using instruments, particularly keyboard instruments, from the collections. For a certain kind of person, it would be worth a special trip to Vermillion, South Dakota, to go to the museum and attend one of those concerts.

We left Carol’s aunt’s house in the middle of the day, had a quick lunch in Yankton, and began driving due south on U.S. Route 81 towards Interstate 80. We crossed the river into Nebraska, and the road climbed up out of the flat river basin into rolling plains. Along with the fields of corn and soybeans we have been seeing ever since Ohio, we started seeing fields with cattle, fields of hay being cut, and other fields of hay already cut and now being baled. The two-lane highway rolled through the green fields, a few trees lining the creek beds or surrounding isolated farm houses, the giant irrigation structures spraying water. We stopped in Norfolk for gas, and bought the local newspaper, the Norfolk Daily News; the front page stories included the following lead paragraphs: “Nebraska has a new tool for fighting wildfires — a single engine air tanker that arrived in Valentine earlier this week.” — and — “An Omaha trial lawyer is making his way through the state, announcing his candidacy for U.S. Senate.”

We stopped in Grand Island, Nebraska, not long before we got back on the interstate. Carol went to buy some fruit juice at the Azteca Market, and I went across the street to The Tattered Page, a used book store. As I was looking through the books, I heard some guys talking about experience points and hit points, and later I saw books for gamers. I walked up to the cashier to buy a copy of Bret Harte’s stories — a former library book that was indeed somewhat tattered — and said to the cashier, “I like the combination of used books and role playing games.” He smiled, and another guy sitting nearby said, without looking up, “Give the people what they want!”

On the interstate, I saw what looked like a bus in front of us. It was a bus, and the lighted destination sign in back read “SF.” The color scheme of the bus looked familiar. As we passed it, we saw that it carried a familiar logo reading MUNI, and other signage proclaimed that it was a hybrid electric vehicle that used biofuels. “Look at that bus!” I said to Carol. We laughed out loud to see a San Francisco bus on the highway in the middle of Nebraska. Later, when we got to our motel in Kearney, we discovered to our delight that the bus was spending the night here as well:

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Joliet, Illinois, to Yankton, South Dakota

Once we left Joliet, it wasn’t far to the outer edge of Chicagoland, that vast sprawling patchwork of suburbia and small cities that extends outward an hour’s drive from Chicago itself. And once we got past Joliet, it felt like we left behind the hustle and bustle and density of the eastern third of the United States: traffic got lighter, the distance between cities became greater, it seemed as though I could feel the density of human beings grow less.

We crossed the Fox River. We used to live near the banks of the Fox River, quite a ways upstream from where we crossed it, ten blocks from the little 1842 stone church building, built of stone hauled up from the river bed in part by the minister, Augustus Conant, the second oldest Unitarian church building still standing west of the Alleghenies.

The miles rolled by. We drove through the barely rolling fields of central Illinois, past the Quad Cities, into the gently rolling land of Iowa, driving almost due west. As we drove, I thought about the dream I had had last night:

Have you climbed up the tower? All the way to the top six levels? someone said to me.
No.
They implied the climb would be spiritually rewarding. So I started to climb.
The first six levels I had already gone up and down: prosaic open-mesh iron staircases of the kind you find in old industrial plants, winding up through a rusted iron structure. Then the staircase from the sixth to the seventh level got very steep, and was behind an iron gate that creaked open.
Then I got into the seventh level. This was the children’s level. A woman I had known in high school sat talking with some children. Bright walls, interesting toys. I moved some mannequins or puppets or dolls made out of wire, to get at the moveable stair case that would get me to the next level.
The eighth level was the map level: it was a balcony around the children’s level, with maps in big wide chart drawers, with big windows above the drawers to look out at the sun setting over the city and landscape beyond….

It was at this point in the dream that the horrendously loud fire alarm went off in the motel. We stumbled around, preparing to get out of the building, when the alarm went silent. We went back to bed, and I began to dream again:

…The ninth level was reached by a steep staircase, the level of Eternal Night: galaxies, suns, darkness, whirling around, and it appeared that in the darkness two or three awe-struck people sat, but of that I couldn’t be sure. I did not stay long there, because it seemed to me that it would be easy to stay there forever.
The tenth level was the level of peace, a peace that surpassed understanding, a place to be in peace. One man sat zazen — I looked at him, and thought, a little scornfully, how stereotypical! — this was a place where peace permeated your being without some painful exercise. I did not stay long here, either.
The eleventh level was the library: low bookshelves all around the four walls, under big picture windows with the sun shining in, trees and birds singing. I wanted to spend a long time here.
The twelfth level: a woman on the stairs warned me that the air was thin. I climbed up the next few stairs. The air was indeed thin; ten thousand, maybe fourteen thousand feet above sea level. I had a hard time catching my breath, but it was a stunning view.

Thinking about such trivial things can occupy the mind for many hours while driving. If you chose, I suppose you could interpret this dream as having deep metaphorical meaning; I ignored any supposed meaning, and just enjoyed remembering it. Soon we stopped at the self-proclaimed largest truck stop in the world. While Carol was inside getting something to drink, I watched as truck pulling an incredibly long blade of a wind turbine held up traffic as it slowly maneuvered into the truck stop:

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At the western edge of the loess hills of western Iowa, we pulled off at a sign that said “Scenic Viewpoint.” The entrance road wound up a knoll. We parked at the top, and climbed up half a dozen flights of steps made of pressure-treated two-by-twelves supported by telephone poles. At the top, we gazed around us: the broad valley of the Missouri River to the west, and to the north, east, and south, the loess hills rising two or even three hundred feet above the bottom of the valley. The tower swayed slightly in stronger gusts of wind, making me feel a little seasick. We were in a hurry to get to Yankton, to we climbed down and began driving again.

Heading north on Interstate 29, we drove through that broad valley of the Missouri River; through the strong smells of the rendering plants near Sioux City, winding along as we roughly paralleled the invisible river somewhere off to our left. After a time we left the interstate and headed due west, slowing down as we drove through the little college town of Vermilion, South Dakota, speeding up again on the other side until we reached Yankton. We ate dinner with Carol’s aunt, and I got to see pictures of Carol as a baby and a little girl.

Stow, Massachusetts, to Fredonia, New York

We left the house of Carol’s dad and his wife at about half past nine this morning, and started driving west. We drove down Interstate 495 to 290 to 90, through the hills of central Massachusetts. I lived most of my life in relatively flat eastern Massachusetts, where small hills rarely rise more than a couple of hundred feet above the general level of the land, where the rivers may take several miles to drop a few feet, where eskers rise up out of swamps. Stow is a few miles to the west of where I grew up, on the edge of the central Massachusetts hills. This part of Massachusetts was settled in the mid-eighteenth century, reached a peak in population half a century later, and in some areas is still less populous than it was in the nineteenth century. The soil is relatively poor and as soon as the rich land west of the Hudson River opened up, people began to leave central Massachusetts. When I did some supply preaching in north central Massachusetts a decade ago, it was hard to find a full-time job, and the great hope of economic salvation was that the commuter rail would extend out far enough that people could commute to the great economic engine that is Boston; the commuter rail never got extended, and I have little doubt that the Great Recession made things worse, not better.

Nevertheless, the tree-covered rolling hills, dotted with crooked roads and clapboard houses, are beautiful; a subtle beauty equal to the dramatic beauty of the California coast. On a hot summer day like today, I think the central Massachusetts hills are more beautiful: the moist air makes distant hills look blue, giving a delightful sense of distance; and the wet spring has made all the vegetation incredibly green.

We climbed up through the Berkshires, reaching an elevation of 1,724 feet; we will not reach that elevation again until we get to Hamilton County, Nebraska. Hamilton County, with a total area of 547 square miles, has a total population of fewer than 10,000 people; Berkshire County, with an area of 947 square miles, has a total year-round population of over 130,000, and a summer population higher than that.

As we drive through New York state, I read aloud to Carol from the newspaper coverage of the aftermath of the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Neither of us was surprised that Zimmerman was acquitted. Carol wondered how the prosecutors allowed a jury to be seated that had no black people; I wondered how Florida could be so stupid as to have a law on the books that basically legalizes murder. I read aloud a quote in the newspaper story that captured something else I was thinking: if Zimmerman had been black and Martin had been white, odds are pretty good that the outcome of the trial could have been different.

After a boring, uneventful drive, we arrived in Fredonia, New York, at about half past six. It was still hot and humid, but we immediately went for a walk so we could stretch our legs. A block or two from our hotel, we came to small cemetery. A plaque facing the street read:

“The Pioneer Cemetery, Town of Pomfret. This site was given by Hezekiah Barker for a cemetery and the first burial here was in 1807. There are 15 known Revolutionary soldiers and many other earlier settlers of Pomfret resting here in this pioneer cemetery. This marker placed by the Pomfret Town Board — 1977. Elizabeth L. Crocker — Town Historian.”

I would not be surprised if at least some of the people buried in this cemetery were originally form the central hills of Massachusetts. I could not find any of the older grave stones that were still legible, though there were a number of old slate stones that were broken or shattered by frost and moisture. Most of the stones that were legible were less interesting mid- to late nineteenth century stones. But I did find one attractive stone, obviously hand-lettered, lying flat on the ground where it had fallen long ago:

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The inscription, as near as I could make it out, reads: “In memory / Lucyett Smith / Who Died July 16th, 1846 / Age 19 years 3 Months & 1 day.”

Wedding

Saco, Maine — I’m at Religious Education Week at Ferry Beach, the Universalist conference center in Maine, taking a class in religious education. One of the people in my class had a big church wedding down in Texas several months ago, which wasn’t a legal wedding because she and her wife are both women. With the recent Supreme Court decision against the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA), their advisors told them that they should have another wedding in a state which sanctions same-sex marriage; Maine, of course, is one of those states. So right after class was over, we all walked over from where we were meeting to the chapel in the grove, and there, under the pine trees still dripping with rain from a passing shower, they were legally married in a brief but meaningful ceremony.

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Our teacher and one of our classmates were the witnesses who signed the wedding documents. They fed us cake and champagne after the ceremony.

It is worth stating the obvious: one effect of the recent Supreme Court decision is (and will be) marriages like this one; even if a same-sex couple can’t be legally married in the state in which they reside, by getting legally married in a state which recognizes same-sex weddings, they can still access some federal marriage benefits. (And I’m thinking that if I’m asked, I would perform such brief ceremonies for out-of-state same-sex couples at no charge.)

Independence Day, Acton, Mass.

Independence Day in Acton, Massachusetts: It was blazing hot and the sky was a perfect New England blue with a few clouds. We went to Nara Park. The chair of the Board of Selectmen read a proclamation. Someone read the Gettysburg Address, then a color guard in Civil War uniforms fired their rifles. I ate a pulled pork sandwich I got from the Lions, Abby had fried chicken from a food truck, Jim ate a hotdog, Carol ate some of my potato chips. A Beatles cover band played. We left before the fireworks so we could sit in Abby and Jim’s living room and watch “Little Britain.” We went to bed late.

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Above: Independence Day sunset, Acton, Mass.

Albany, New York, to Alice’s Restaurant in Stockbridge, Massachusetts

The view out our eighth story window when we got up in the morning showed wet roofs on buildings you don’t see in the Bay Area: chimneys and ornamental brickwork from the first half of the nineteenth century mixed in with newer brick buildings and one or two older wood frame houses.

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Carol remarked that the neighborhood we’re in looks like some of the older parts of Washington, D.C. While she was in a thrift store looking for a raincoat, I walked around Lark Street and Willet Street admiring the brickwork, ornamental ironwork, and bay windows on the townhouses (they were too grand to call rowhouses), and the old stone Methodist church around the corner from our hotel.

A short uneventful drive brought us to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We stopped for lunch at small restaurant down a short alley, that held just eight marble-topped tables. The sign our front said, “Teresa’s Restaurant, formerly Alice’s Restaurant.” On the walls were a framed album cover of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” a small steel string guitar singed by Arlo Guthrie, a painting of a 1960s-vintage VW bus, several framed articles from various publications featuring Arlo Guthrie and Alice’s Restaurant, along with a framed photo, dated 1997, showing Alice, Arlo, and Teresa.

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We are less interested in being in the restaurant made famous by Arlo Guthrie’s anti-war song than in finding a place that has good inexpensive lunches — I had a pretty good turkey burger, and excellent sweet potato fries — and, more importantly, in finding a place with free wifi. We’re not sure if we’ll have wifi the next few days. Carol’s dad and his wife were the winning bidders on a Berkshires summer house at a fundraising auction at their Unitarian Universalist church, and we’ll be staying there with them, and my dad and his best friend — but we don’t know if there will be wifi, so we have to get our Internet fix now. In the mean time, I’ve had the refrain of Arlo Guthrie’s famous song running through my head: “You can get anything you want / At Alice’s restaurant.”

Macedonia, Ohio, to Albany, New York

We stopped for an early lunch just inside the Ohio border at a truck stop. But the truck stop only had one of those miserable fast food joints, which cannot even be dignified with the title of restaurant. But we looked across the road from the truck stop, and there perched on the top of a little hill was a sign proclaiming in big red letters FOOD. Another, smaller, sign, read: The Beef and Beer Popular Sandwiches and Famous Beers. The decision was made easily, by consensus, and almost instantaneously: we went to The Beef and Beer. The food was a little greasy, but good. The waitress gave me some sauce to go with my sweet potato waffle fries, saying, “There’s you sauce, it’s nummy.” It was indeed nummy: some kind of cinnamon sugar sauce, but not too sweet, a perfect match for the sweet potato fries.

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Soon we were on the New York Thruway, which is not a particularly pleasant road to drive. The goal of the New York Thruway is to get as many vehicles as possible to their destinations without letting them off the highway, and while charging them substantial tolls. We stopped at one of the service areas near Rochester. It wasn’t too terrible. It had the usual crummy fast food, but it also had a player piano that played constantly. This rest area was crowded, presumably with people coming back from or heading off to summer destinations for the week of July 4. It wasn’t too bad a service area, but I was glad to get back in our car and start driving.

There is a point on the New York Thruway where the road has to pass through a gap in the hills between the Adirondack and Catskill mountains. Here the Mohawk River, enlarged to carry the traffic of the Erie Canal, the railroad that used to be the New York Central, the interstate highway, and a smaller state highway all come close together to pass through the tree-clad hills that rise dramatically and steeply up on either side. It’s a dramatic stretch of road, and I’d been looking forward to seeing it again, but as we got closer it started raining, and by the time we got there the rain was heavy enough that traffic had slowed down to 55 miles an hour; the heavy rain obscured the view, and I had keep my eyes on the road in any case.

We arrived in Albany at a quarter to nine. After we checked into our small downtown hotel, we went for a walk down Lark Street. A sign proclaimed something to the effect of “Welcome to Lark Street, a village in the city”; I can’t remember the exact wording. We saw lots of young hipsters walking the streets and sitting outside small bars and restaurants, all of them dressed much alike, urban chic clothing carefully chosen so as not to look too carefully chosen. A flashing electronic traffic sign parked by the side of the road informed motorists and motorcyclists that a city ordinance prohibited excessively loud music coming from vehicles. About five seconds after I saw this sign, a car passed by vibrating and pulsing with excessively loud music. I had wondered how they could enforce such a city ordinance.

We didn’t walk around much. My nerves were jangled with too much driving. I bought a copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and I now propose to read it until the excessively gray prose quiets my nerves and puts me to sleep; this will take about five minutes; or ten minutes, if I start by reading the book review section.

Macedonia, Ohio, to Hudson, Ohio

The only driving we did today was from our motel to to our aunt and uncle’s place in Hudson.

Once we got to Hudson, my uncle took us on a driving tour of Cuyahoga National Park: the old Ohio and Erie canal and towpath; the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad, originally the Cuyahoga Valley Line, which uses vintage diesel locomotives and passenger cars; the spectacular Brandywine Falls; and, of most interest to all of us, the heron rookery. The Great Blue Herons were still on their nests, big, ungainly, awkward-looking birds perched on huge next built of sticks high up in trees. I counted nine nests in one tree, and there were at least four trees with nests in them.

At one point, my uncle and aunt and I were sitting in the car waiting for Carol, and listening to a talk given by a professor from Case Western Reserve University. She has been doing research on Internet access and broadband usage among residents of different socioeconomic classes, races, and ethnic groups in the Cleveland area. We all know that Americans have unequal access to broadband Internet service, but this professor’s research shows more precisely who has what kind of Internet access. For example, her research shows that people whose only Internet access is through a smartphone tend to be disproportionately African American or Latino. I’m going to have to track down who this woman is, and read more about her research.

In the late afternoon, Carol and I visited a small independent bookstore in Hudson called The Learned Owl Book Shop. While I was buying a new road atlas for our trip, I got into a conversation with the woman who was staffing the store that day. She said the store was doing quite well, and has a loyal following. We both said how much we hate Amazon, a soul-less corporate entity that cares only about profit, and about crushing all competitors. I told her about a post on Melville House blog (Melville House is a small independent publisher who recently released The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in Culture of Easy Answers, of interest to religious liberals) that is titled “There are exactly zero defensible reasons for authors to link to Amazon.” She was amused. Carol and I spent an hour at The Learned Owl; amazingly, this is the first visit to a book store we have made on this trip.

We joined my aunt and uncle, and my cousin and her husband, for a pleasant dinner. We talked a little about education and autism, which my cousin’s work deals with, and a little about multiple sclerosis research, which relates to her husband’s work; but mostly we talked about family.

And when Carol and I got back to the motel, we watched the episode about Cleveland cuisine from Anthony Bourdain’s TV series “No Reservations.” Head cheese, chili, sausage, and postmodern midwestern cuisine — we decided we have to come back to the Cleveland area soon.

Auburn, Indiana, to Macedonia, Ohio

Because we were going to have a short drive today, less than four hours, we did a few errands in Auburn before we started driving: Carol went to the Salvation Army store to look for a hat, and I went to get the oil changed in the car. The workers in the oil change place were perhaps the nicest, friendliest, most courteous workers you could imagine. They finished the oil change so quickly it surprised me, and I drove over to wait for Carol. While I waited for her in the parking lot, enjoying the cool, dry air that followed the cold front, I heard a child’s voice ask, “Can we get pizza, ma?” and a man’s voice replied without emotion, “Shut up.” I watched the family walk past our car to another parking place: a man, a woman, and three children between the ages of five and eight, none of them saying a word or looking at each other. I decided not to make generalizations about the people of Auburn, Indiana, based either on the nicest workers imaginable, or on the father who told his child to shut up. People are about the same everywhere: some are very nice, some are the opposite, and most of us are a mixture of both.

We stopped at a rest area outside Toledo to eat lunch. I bought the Toledo Blade, which bragged on its masthead that it is one of American’s great newspapers. But the Toledo Blade left no impression on me whatsoever.

As we ate, dark clouds moved in and a wind whipped up. Soon after we got back on the road, it began raining so hard that traffic slowed down to thirty miles an hour, and once there was enough water on the roadway to engage the antilock braking system (ABS); our old car had not had ABS, so it was a new experience for me to feel the brakes pulsing while I kept a steady pressure on the brake pedal. At about this time, the odometer clicked over to 100,000 miles; I had meant to watch for this singular event, but the visibility was so poor, and the driving required so much attention, I missed when it happened. I hope this car lasts another 100,000 miles; we like it, and it has delivered up to forty miles per gallon for us.

We arrived in Macedonia, Ohio — a few minutes before another thunderstorm passed through — checked in to our motel, and went to have dinner with my aunt and uncle and cousin, at the retirement community my aunt and uncle live in. The day was relatively uneventful, but the evening was filled with family conversation.