We stayed with my friend Mike and his wife Michele at their place in Winthrop. It is almost impossible to overstate how much more convenient it is to stay at someone’s house than a hotel when you’re traveling with an infant. Mike borrowed a pack’n'play from a co-worker so that we didn’t have to bring ours with us or rent one once we got there. We were able to put Garrison to bed in our bedroom on the third floor of the house, and stay awake with Mike and Michele on the first floor. If we had a hotel room, we likely would have been stuck sitting quietly in a dimly lit room once he went to bed since we probably would have had just one room. Mike’s place had a fridge where we could keep Garrison’s medicine, a comfy sofa on which we could sit, a sink in which we could wash the boy’s dishes, and numerous other little perks. Thanks again, Mike and Michele, for having the three of us.

We spent most of Saturday at the baby shower, where the new mom-to-be was showered with all manner of baby gifts. On our way back to Mike’s we stopped at Nick’s House of Pizza, and brought back a pizza and a pair of calzones for dinner at Mike’s. Nick’s was among our favorite pizza places when we were in school, so we always like to stop in and avail ourselves of their mouthwatering calzones whenever we have the chance.

On Sunday, we helped Mike and Michele install a new chandelier in their dining room, since the previous one was broken. In the middle of that process, we decamped to Plymouth, MA for a mouthwatering lunch at the legendary Lobster Hut. I ate both a fried scallop roll and a fried clam roll. It has been a long time since I’ve eaten at Lobster Hut, and will probably be even longer until the next time, so I had no shame about ordering two sandwiches absolutely overflowing with fresh, fried seafood. Mike and Sarah showed a bit more restraint, but everyone (with the exception of Garrison) left the lunch table stuffed full of fried seafood.

After lunch, we took a long walk on Plymouth’s Long Beach. Sarah and I enjoyed walking on the beach when we lived in Plymouth, and we still like to take walks on it whenever we get back to Massachusetts.

Some people might be wondering how Garrison did on the airplane flights. I would say that he earned a B, overall. He is just too independent-minded at the moment to enjoy being cooped up on our laps for long periods of time. He won’t nap when he’s put in stimulating environments like an airport and a plane. He often won’t eat when placed in those same environments. That meant that he was extremely fussy on that last flight home. Would we fly with him again? At this point, we wouldn’t consent to take him on a flight that lasted over two hours. That’s about his time limit. After that, he starts to meltdown and everyone on the flight suffers.

For interested parties, there are photos from the trip in the Photo Gallery.

As usual, the drive there and back was epic in length. There is simply no good time to drive through or around Chicago. We hit the metro area around noon while traveling eastbound and around 13:00 while westbound but had to suffer through traffic both times. I guess the only consolation is that we didn’t expose ourselves to full-on rush hour traffic. At least the electronic tolling that Illinois installed over the last couple of years has made the payment of tolls less of a headache.

Dalla came with us, as you might expect. She’s not much for staying at other people’s houses, but she likes visiting the Cleveland Metro Parks and running through the woods.

The Cleveland metro area is about like I remember it. More real estate signs than I’ve seen there in the past as their housing market is suffering a fair amount, but that’s probably the biggest visible change. The Ohio GOP is using many of the same tactics that the Wisconsin GOP currently employs to discourage people from voting, which I guess isn’t surprising. Skullduggery doesn’t seem to be limited by state lines.

There is no doubt that we benefited in some ways from the recent passage of Hurricane Gustav through the area and the threat that Hurricane Ike posed until it deviated towards Texas. Until the Friday before we left, we encountered very few tourists and could do just about anything we wanted without fear of crowds. It was only at the very end of our trip that tourists started to come back and venues started to fill up.

New Orleans proper (roughly 200,000 people) actually has a smaller population than Madison (roughly 225,000) now. The NOLA metro area is still much larger than Madison’s, but you can see what happens when a city loses half of its population without looking very far. The central business district and many of the larger streets still boast plenty of boarded up and abandoned buildings. We saw people living in FEMA trailers and houses that still had the search and rescue paint on the outside. There are vast swathes of the city that have almost no one living in them, while other parts of town have recovered quite well. I hesitate to say that anywhere has recovered 100%, but certainly areas like the French Quarter are nearly there.

Our original itinerary called for us to spend three nights in New Orleans, and then travel east and west of the city to spend a few more nights before coming back to spend one last night in NOLA. However, due to Gustav and Ike, we spent all seven nights in NOLA. You couldn’t get a hotel room west of the city for love or money as numerous evacuees from coastal LA and TX were occupying the hotel rooms in towns like Lafayette. East of the city, there were rooms to be had, but there wasn’t much reason to stay out there since most of what we wanted to do could be done as day trips.

So what did we do for seven days? We ate. Lots and lots of calories. Probably 3000 at every meal. As one person we met there said, “If it ain’t fried, it ain’t cooked.” Cajun cooking is good, but the first ingredient in most recipes is butter and the last instruction is “deep fry until golden brown”. In addition, all the portions are huge. At the end, we were ordering one entree and a salad, splitting them, and still coming away from the table quite full.

In addition to eating we took the “tour” of the Tabasco factory. Unless you’re already in Lafayette, that’s a factory tour worth skipping. I like Tabasco more than most people, but even I thought the tour wasn’t worth the drive 2.5 hours each way from our hotel. In New Iberia, just north of the Tabasco factory, we had gumbo that was so bad we didn’t eat more than a couple of spoonfuls. The day was saved, however, when we visited Lake Martin and saw alligators and numerous interesting birds.

Another day trip took us east of the city for a swamp boat tour. That was an OK tour, but nothing special. After the tour, Sarah was giving me directions to go somewhere and she said, “if you get to Mississippi, you’ve gone too far.” When I asked how far away it was, and she said, “Five miles”, I replied that we were going to Mississippi. It was one of the states I’d never visited (current count of unvisited states: and Sarah wanted to visit the Gulf Coast, so we went. The beaches were in pretty bad shape due to Gustav, so we drove around looking at the damage, ate dinner at a beachfront restaurant that had recently re-opened, and went back to our hotel.

In New Orleans itself we ate beignets at Cafe du Monde numerous times. They were just too good to miss. In addition, we visited the Insectarium, which is a museum/zoo devoted to insects. One of the exhibits involved local chefs integrating bugs into food and then serving it to customers. We both tried beignets with crickets in them. They go down easy enough, but there definitely is a mental block associated with eating bugs that makes it difficult to ignore the fact that you just ate several crickets. That same day we took in an IMAX film; there were maybe thirty people in the whole theater.

We listened to plenty of jazz, including two shows at Preservation Hall. The first time we went there was no crowd and no waiting. We got right in, got good seats right in front and heard some good jazz. The second time was the night right before we left when all the other tourists came back. There was standing room only and some people had to listen from the hall. We saw Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO) play at a show at a club named The Snug Harbor, as well. We had seen Mayfield and NOJO play a show at Madison’s Overture Center and that was a fairly formal show with the band on stage in suits. This was much more casual, with the band members switching out on a small stage and everyone dressed very casually. Finally, we took in a jazz show at a local bar that was pretty good.

We didn’t rent a car for our whole trip there, as the streetcars would take us from our hotel to downtown and back without much fuss. However, we had a rental car for three days so that we could get out of the city proper. Or, more precisely, we had a different rental car every day for three days. The first car we got had tire problems, so we swapped it out for another one. That one developed tire problems, so we swapped it out for a third. The tires on that one held up just long enough for us to turn it back in on the third day. Apparently, that’s a common problem post-hurricane, if the local residents and rental car folks can be believed.

Now we’re back in Madison and trying to work off some of those NOLA calories. We had a good time on the trip, the weather was generally quite cooperative, and we will likely go back for another visit some day in the future.

Once I got there, it was the usual drill of dealing with the crowds, unrelenting sun, and the heat. I usually travel up there on a weekday, which keeps the crowds a bit more manageable, and this year I got lucky because much of the day was overcast which helped with the heat.

Unlike previous years, I tried to spend more time attending forums this year, and spent less time wandering among the aircraft. The forums give you a chance to hear interesting and notable speakers (Burt Rutan, for instance) in a small and relatively intimate gathering. By far the best forum I attended was given by a pair of veteran air traffic controllers who had worked several AirVentures. They were full of interesting insights and funny stories.

Even though I enjoyed the forums, the air show and the airplanes are a big reason to attend. The highlights of the air show this year were the V-22 Osprey and the F-22 Raptor.

The V-22 Osprey is the new tilt-rotor aircraft used by the Marines and Air Force. I had never seen one in person, much less in flight, so it was really fascinating to watch the plane come in with its gigantic propellors turning before rotating its engines and landing on the runway much like a helicopter would.

The V-22 Osprey was whisper quiet compared to the F-22 Raptor. That plane is an absolute screamer, even when it isn’t really trying. The F-22 flew over the pair of parallel runways for roughly ten minutes and the crowd loved every minute of it. Easily its most impressive maneuver was when it demonstrated its incredibly (almost unbelievably) tight turn radius. In the end, however, it was rather like watching an extremely high performance automobile being driven around a parking lot or a cheetah in a zoo. You just knew that it was capable of so much more than was on display and it was rather sad to watch it in such constrained circumstances.

There were some other interesting planes on hand this year. I enjoyed a tour of a Wisconsin Air National Guard KC-135. I didn’t realize that there were a large number of seats and cargo space on top of the fuel tanks in the plane’s cargo area. A KC-10 also made an appearance. A Navy SH-60 Sea Hawk was an interesting counterpoint to all the jets and planes on hand and its crew worked the crowd quite intensely.

Will I go back next year? Almost every year I say that I’m going take a year off and then the next year rolls around and I get the urge to go again. So, I’m thinking that next year I’ll take a year off. We’ll just have to see what happens when July rolls around again.

In the interim, there are some photos of the air show in the photo gallery.

A horse taxi is, generally, two horses hooked up to a wagon that has three or four rows of bench seating, a driver, and a battery driven radio that is used to dispatch the drivers to locations around the island. Depending on the driver, the load in the wagon, and the horses, the speed of the taxi ranges from “slower than I can walk” to “much slower than I can ride a bike”. As a longtime Mackinac resident/visitor advised us, “If you expect to get anywhere here in a hurry, you’re going to be disappointed.”

We spent the next day in downtown Mackinac exploring the historic fort, fudge shops (Mackinac is famous for its fudge), and generally seeing the sights. Dalla wasn’t always welcome in all those places, but she was welcome in the fort so she and I explored that in depth while others were shopping and eating fudge. Interestingly, the general verdict was the Mackinac fudge didn’t live up to the hype. I’m not a fan of fudge usually, so I trust to the judgement of others on that issue.

We left the next day after another, um, relaxed ride on a horse taxi down to the ferry. Once back in St. Ignace we packed up the car and headed to our next destination, Munising, MI. On our way out of St. Ignace, we were traveling westbound on US Route 2 when some large wooden signs blew out of the back of a trailer in the lane next to us. The signs, of course, flew into our lane, and despite my efforts to dodge them, one smashed into the front of the car. So, we had an opportunity to meet one of the local politicos (it was a campaign sign that hit our car), the state patrol, the city police (there was a jurisdictional dispute), and some other folks who knew the politician. He was a nice enough guy, and he clued us in to a good pasty joint, but that doesn’t excuse his failure to properly secure the load he was towing. Fortunately, the damage was mostly cosmetic, and the car was still fully functional, so we were able to drive on after a delay of an hour or so.

As I mentioned above, we stopped at a local pasty joint, Lehto’s, on our way to Munising. Pasties (pronounced: pass-tees) are something of an Upper Peninsula tradition. They were brought there by Cornish miners in the days of yore and they continue to be baked and served by mom-and-pop joints all over the place. A pasty is basically meat, potato, onions, and rutabagas wrapped up in dough and baked. It doesn’t sound that good, but it is actually fairly tasty when done correctly. We ate several pasties during our travels.

We eventually caught up with our fellow travelers at the Seney National Wildlife Refuge where we joined them for some birdwatching. The big highlights of the bird watching were loons, trumpeter swans, sandhill cranes, and all the mosquitoes in the world.

Rather than continuously harp on the mosquitoes, I’ll dedicate this paragraph to them and you can safely assume from here on out that if something happened outdoors it was under the nearly constant onslaught of mosquitoes. The only exceptions are anything that happened within spitting distance of Lake Superior. The backcountry campsites on Bowman Lake in Glacier National park and the backcountry trails at Effigy Mounds National Monument are the only other places that I’ve been where the mosquitoes were as bad as they were in the UP. We kept trying to figure out how the denizens of the area were able to go outside without being driven absolutely crazy by the bugs and we never did come up with an answer. Sarah and I would go out to walk the dog in the morning and as long as we were walking, the bugs were manageable. However, as soon as we stopped they would pounce and we’d have to start walking again or risk losing several pints of blood. Neither Sarah or I brought our headnets with us so we bought them in Munising. The fact that a garden variety hardware store had a selection of six different types right near the cash registers is probably a sign of just how bad things can get there, especially once the black flies come out.

Anyway, after our stop in Seney we headed to our rented cabin on Powell Lake in the Hiawatha National Forest, which is just a few miles south of Munising. The cabin was advertised as pet-friendly, but when we got there, signs said that pets had to remain in the laundry room. We decided to ignore those signs because we didn’t rent a pet-friendly laundry room, we rented a pet-friendly cabin, so Dalla had free run of the place. The cabin was OK, but it had some warts. The basement, where two of the bedrooms were located, was partially unfinished. Tina and Mike’s room, for instance, had a bare concrete floor. One wall of the basement was just panels of solid Styrofoam insulation on top of the concrete foundation. The basement shower was easily the highest-tech shower that I’ve ever encountered. It had two heads; multiple knobs; some undecipherable temperature scale; and a mysterious, unlabeled red button. The upstairs bathroom had, mysteriously enough, a ceiling fan. Don’t confuse that with an exhaust fan mounted in the ceiling. When I say ceiling fan, I mean a ceiling fan like you’d put in your living room. There was also the spiral staircase of death down, which several people nearly tripped, that led to a loft bedroom appropriate for people of the same stature as the Seven Dwarves. If it hadn’t been for the mosquitoes, the fire pit along the lake might have been a nice place to sit.

While we were there, one of the neighbor dogs (all of the dogs we met there ran free without their owner’s supervision, for some reason) took a shine to Dalla, probably because they looked so much alike. He was a puppy, but larger than her. She didn’t hesitate to put him into his place, however, so they generally got along. Since he would constantly come by the cabin to see if she was available to play with him, and would tag along on our walks (driving Dalla crazy since she was on a leash) we decided to call him Cling. That’s cling as in clingy.

The reason we were in Munising to begin with was the presence of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. It was the first designated national lakeshore and the best way to see it is from the lake, so we took a boat tour. It was a fairly cold and windy day on Lake Superior, but the scenery was worth it. Pictured Rocks is a series of multi-hued sandstone cliffs along the lake, some of which are over 200 feet tall. Even though the park has hiking trails, the best way to see the cliffs is from the water. So, once you’ve done that, you’ve basically seen the park.

We spent the next morning hiking in the national forest which meant tromping around in our long sleeves, long pants, and headnets, even though it wasn’t that chilly. In the afternoon Sarah and I relaxed for a bit while the others hit a few gift shops in Munising or went hiking along the Lakeshore. We didn’t go on that hike because the Lakeshore, for some really mysterious reason, flat-out bans dogs from the park. Eventually, we got together with a couple of other party members to try our hands at mini-golf. That idea went over the boards when we found the mini-golf course closed due to a death in the family, so we drove out of Munising to see what we could find on the other side of town. What we found was Christmas, Michigan, a small town that basically consists of a few houses, a casino, and a store that sells Christmas stuff, year round. Woo, hoo, I guess. As the only guy along on that part of the expedition (Mike was hiking along the lake), I got one of my two “Yays!” from the girls on the trip by suggesting that we stop there to see what the gift shop sold. That wasn’t enough to hold our attention for too long, so we spent the next hour plus wandering on a Lake Superior beach skipping stones and collecting attractive rocks for our rock garden at home.

We left the next day for the final stop on our tour of the UP. We spent part of the day driving to Paradise, Michigan, with a stop at Tahquamenon Falls State Park to see the Upper Falls along the way. The Upper Falls are OK; the best part is the presence of a small, but high-quality, brew pub near the Upper Falls.

We were out in a fairly remote part of the UP to visit the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, which is truly worth the trip. It’s not the biggest museum you’ll ever visit, but it is certainly one of the highest quality. The exhibits are full of interesting information and extremely unique items. The staff is helpful, but generally not intrusive. You can see it all in one day and not feel like you were rushed or might have missed anything of value. If nothing else, seeing a second order Fresnell Lens is worth the price of admission.

The biggest downside to the area where we stayed was the lack of amenities other than the museum or the lake. We ended up driving twenty or so miles back to the brew pub at the Falls for dinner because it was widely acknowledged by locals as the place to eat dinner.

After a one night stay in the area, we jumped back in our car and headed back to Madison. Fortunately, that was a long, but uneventful denouement.

There are a few pictures in the gallery if you’re interested.

The next items to slip into your pocket are earplugs. Until you’ve used earplugs on a flight you probably don’t realize just how loud an airliner is. The engines certainly make plenty of noise, but so does the air conditioning system and the air rushing by the fuselage. In addition, earplugs are reasonably effective at drowning out the noise of crying babies and small children. And don’t worry about missing out on any of those supposedly important announcements from the cockpit or the stewards. The PA system on an airliner is turned up quite loud so that it can be heard over all the rushing air and engine noises; you won’t have trouble hearing it with earplugs in. Finally, if you’re flying on a military transport, earplugs are standard issue as those planes have no sound insulation. I recommend Howard Leight LaserLite earplugs, though others work nearly as well. Again, earplugs go in your pocket, not your carry-on luggage.

A Sharpie marker should also accompany you on your travel. This can travel in your carry-on. I don’t recommend the ultra-fine point; the fine point is probably what you want. At worst, it can serve as a backup for your ballpoint pen in note-taking situations. At best, you’ll find it invaluable for writing on packages you send back home through the mail or for writing your name on food that goes in a communal fridge if you stay at a hostel or backpackers.

By now, everyone knows about the useless but inflexible security rule that all liquids larger than three ounces are banned from carry-on luggage. This presents a problem if you want to bring home some olive oil or a small bottle of spirits from the country you are visiting. Hence, I like to carry a gallon-sized Ziploc or Glad plastic bag in my luggage. That way you can seal the bottle of liquid in the bag and place it in your checked luggage for the trip home. The gallon bags also come in handy if you find yourself with some leftovers you want to save from a meal you cooked in a hostel or backpackers.

Sleeping on an airliner is difficult at best due to the fact that you’re forced to sleep in an upright position. Airlines used to routinely provide pillows and blankets to ease the discomfort somewhat, but now they don’t bother (generally due to cost cutting). So, you’re best off bringing your own pillow. I recommend an inflatable neck pillow (Eagle Creek makes a couple, as do others). The neck pillow fits around your neck and supports your head and neck no matter which way your head flops during flight. The advantage to an inflatable model over buckwheat or another pillow filling is that it can also be deflated make storage and transportation easier. I’ll often see people with other travel pillows lugging them around the airport and it never looks fun. Meanwhile, an inflatable pillow is conveniently stored in my backpack and then transferred to the seatback pocket when I board the plane until I need it.

If you’re easily bothered by ambient light while sleeping, a sleeping mask will make your life easier. Again, Eagle Creek and others make and sell these. You can use the mask both on the flight and while sleeping in foreign lands while trying to overcome jet lag. Some airlines will provide these on long overseas flights but the one you bring will be more comfortable and durable.

A small notebook often comes in handy for jotting down random bits of information that you don’t want to lose. I prefer the 3″x5″ spiral bound size but whatever is small enough to easily carry works well.

If you’re purchasing a digital camera for travel, I suggest buying one that runs on AA batteries. You can use rechargeables to save money and the environment most of the time, but if they run out at an inopportune moment, you can always get a set of AAs from a corner store and get up and running again.

If you want to be easily identified at 100 yards as an American tourist, bring a baseball cap, preferably one that is well used. If you want to keep sunburn to a minimum and travel a bit more low-key at the same time, I suggest a hat with a brim that runs around the entire hat. This will keep your ears and, hopefully, your neck from suffering from the sun’s rays.

These are all small items that will make your life a bit easier as you travel. You may not use every item every trip but if you need one and you already have it in your hands you’ll likely never travel without it again.

At LAX I had nearly three hours to kill and a wicked hunger so I decided to seek out dinner rather than simply eating a snack and hoping for the best with dinner on the plane. The last two times I went through LAX I ate at one of the restaurants in the international terminal. The food there isn’t going to kill you, but it isn’t memorable either so I decided to seek calories a bit further afield.

It’s worth noting here that LAX is something of a dump. The vast majority of the buildings are gently described as architectural mistakes while the others make parking garage architecture look progressive. After walking past seemingly innumerable gates and ticket counters I finally reached the LAX Theme Building. It’s a building that you’ve likely all seen in movies. Inside that building is Encounter Restaurant. Seeing as how I had some time to kill, a belly to fill, and no other interesting prospects in sight, I made my way up to the restaurant for a meal.

Encounter Restaurant

Normally, I’m not a salad guy, but I decided to go out on a limb and try a garden salad with my meal because it sounded good to me as I read the menu. The Toy Box tomatoes that were in the salad were possibly the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten. They were so sweet that it was more like eating grapes than tomatoes. The rest of the meal was certainly edible, but not in the same league as those tomatoes.

After filling my belly, I wandered back to my flight and settled in for the nearly thirteen hour flight to Auckland. It is worth noting that a flight of that duration is a strong disincentive for people to visit New Zealand. It’s really a wonderful country filled with fantastic scenery and friendly people but it is so damn far away! Of course, it if was closer the country would likely be overrun with yahoos and that would likely destroy much of its charm so perhaps I shouldn’t complain too much.

The lady sitting next to me was initially skeptical when I told her that the flight we were embarking upon was seemingly interminable. After ten hours of flight time, however, she was singing a different tune and pledging never to attempt such a long flight again without going first class.

We did eventually arive in Auckland, and after waiting almost one and one-half hours, I made it through passport control, customs, and biosecurity. That left me just enough time to hustle over to the domestic terminal to make my flight to Christchurch (1.5 hours in duration).

Finally, after thirty hours of travel, I arrived at my hotel, where I was able to shower, change clothes, and start the process of unwinding both physically and mentally from that much air travel.

The first priority was to get some lunch, so I bought a (very good) spicy brautwurst from a street vendor near an art fair and an English-style bitter from a local brewer. I ate both of those while listening to Christmas carols sung by a local group.

Christmas Carols

Once I had taken the edge off my initial hunger, it was time to seek out additional calories. Gelato was the next to find its way into my stomach. I bought a couple of local brews from a bottle shop, a pesto/tomato/brie bagel from a cafe, and made my way into the Botanical Gardens.

Amazing New Zealand Trees

If there is one thing I like about New Zealand in general, and Christchurch in particular, it is their ability to grow some incredibly impressive trees. There are several trees that I remembered quite vividly from my last trip here and I made it a point of visiting them again today. Taking pictures of the trees hardly does them justice. It’s rather like trying to photograph a very tall skyscraper or a very wide river. You have to get so far away to get the object in the frame that it loose much of its impressive size.

Eventually, I found my way to a pair of absolutely gigantic eucalyptus trees and sat down to continue my repast. As I sat under the canopy of that massive tree, drinking a couple of beers, eating a hot sandwich, and reading a good book, my muscles finally started to unknot. All that flying simply isn’t good for the human body. It was a delight to enjoy the simple pleasures of food, drink, a book, and a gorgeous day before continuing my trip to the Pole.

After a reasonably pleasant (for air travel) flight from Madison (via Milwaukee) we landed in Boston on Thursday night. Almost as soon as we landed and the skyline of downtown Boston came into view, it occurred to me how much both Boston and myself had changed. Sarah and I have been back to Boston several times since we left there in October, 1998, but I’d never felt so strongly before that the phase of my life where I called Boston home is so completely in the past. If I were ever to move back there again (an extremely unlikely scenario), it would be a new experience, and not merely a continuation of my past times there.

We made our way by public transit to Cambridge where we stowed our luggage at the home of a friend of Sarah’s. Then we were off to find dinner. We ended up in Harvard Square (which has gone a long way in the wrong direction and is no longer a place worth visiting) where we had a passable meal at John Harvard’s.

Friday morning we arose, picked up a rental car from an off-airport location, and then drove to scenic Chelsea to pick up a rented blazer that I needed to fit in to the wedding party scenery. After that, we drove to Somerville where we parked at Tufts and walked around for a while. The campus has changed quite a bit in the eleven years since we graduated. There are several new buildings and the students all seem very young. While we were touring the library, a librarian came out of a room and asked me, with all honesty, if I was ready for school to start on Tuesday. I explained that I had graduated ten years earlier and was just touring the old alma mater. Sarah, of course, got a big kick out that as she thinks that I’ve got a baby face and the librarian’s actions just confirmed her suspicions.

After a walk around campus, we ate lunch at Nick’s House of Pizza. Their calzones are still fabulous, even if they cost roughly 29% more than they did while we attended school there.

Because it was the Friday before Labor Day, we decided to head for our accommodations on the South Shore after lunch. It was likely that scads of commuters would take off from work early and head for the Cape, so it might take longer than usual to reach Plymouth, where we had a hotel room booked for the night.

After a relatively uneventful, and sometimes slow, drive to Plymouth we found our hotel, the Blue Spruce Motel. The Blue Spruce’s primary drawing card is its price. It isn’t in a scenic location (unless you consider a strip mall parking lot scenic) nor is it conveniently located. It was not unpleasantly dirty and the folks running the front desk were nice. We didn’t have long to enjoy listening to the state highway a hundred from our front door, however, as we needed to get back north to the wedding rehearsal dinner, which we thought started at 17:00.

We left ourselves plenty of time and arrived at 16:30. Oops. Not only were we early, but we had the time wrong. The rehearsal didn’t actually start until 17:30. So, we chatted with a guy mowing the church’s lawn, and then we went for a sort of scenic drive in Scituate and Humarock where we saw all sorts of architectural atrocities: nice beachside places had been torn down and replaced with three story monsters.

Eventually, the rehearsal started. I’ll save you the details except to say that we practiced the ceremony one way, promptly changed everything, and then walked out the door. It didn’t really matter, though. No one really cares how the wedding party processes, or doesn’t, as long as a couple get hitched somewhere during the whole affair.

Rather than participate in a cocktail hour that neither of us needed, Sarah and I drove back to Scituate and had fried clams at the Sands End Cafe before heading to the rehearsal dinner. Even the unfortunate music being made by a guy with a guitar couldn’t mask how delicious those clams were. They were sweet and savory; hot and crispy; and served with a tasty tartar sauce. They were spectacular.

The next day we spent the morning walking around Plymouth. I like Plymouth and it is one of the few areas that I used to live in Massachusetts that I could see myself living again. We walked down Main/Court St. and found that our favorite Irish bar closed and that a rib joint now occupies that space. Meanwhile, a Mexican-themed place (note that I don’t actually call it Mexican; that would be an insult to our neighbors to the south) that should have gone out of business looong ago remains open. The British groceries store remains mystifyingly open, with the same lack of customers and sales. The brewpub we liked is closed; the diner we liked is still open. After that it was time for a walk on the water front. Plymouth Rock is still there. One of our favorite moments of the morning was watching a man take extensive video footage of Plymouth Rock.

For lunch on Saturday we drove out to Massasoit State Park where we met some friends who live in Vermont. We met them when they lived in Madison, but after graduating from UW-Madison they moved out to Vermont where he is taking part in a family business. Her parents live in Rhode Island and they were down to visit her parents for the weekend so they agreed to meet us halfway between Plymouth and her parents’ place. We had a good time reminiscing for a couple hours over food and (illicit) wine before they had to get back and we needed to start on our journey to the Cape.

We had plans to meet up with a former co-worker of Sarah’s for dinner at his house on the Cape, but she wanted to see some of her old work sites on the Cape so we started a bit earlier than we needed. Along the way, we stopped at a house where Sarah rented a room while she lived on the Cape. The woman with whom she used to live was at home and we spent more than an hour catching up with her and her significant other. They have done extensive work to the house, both enlarging and renovating it, so it was fun to see the changed house.

The last time I saw the kids of Sarah’s former co-worker, they were something like 7 and 5 years old. That was how I pictured them in my mind until I met a pair of teenagers when we walked in the door. The old kid is now seventeen, a senior in high school, and trying to decide where to go to college. The girl, now fifteen, baby sits and helps to run a dance school. When Sarah still worked there she used to watch the Teletubbies with the girl. Once we got over how much the kids had grown we had a very pleasant evening eating, drinking, and catching up with the whole family.

Sunday morning we took a long walk on Plymouth’s Long Beach, which is one of our favorite things to do in Plymouth. It’s a narrow spit of land extends two miles into the ocean with a sandy beach on one side. We walked almost all the way out to the end before time pressures forced to us to turn around and head for our car. After all, we had to leave plenty of time for lunch because we had Lobster Hut on the brain.

If ever travel to Plymouth and fail to eat at Lobster hut, you’ve truly missed out on the of the area’s gems. We never fail to eat there if there is even a remote possibility of doing so. It’s one of those rare restaurants that’s so good it stays open even in the winter when the nearest tourist is three hundred miles away. If you’re only going to eat one meal there, I recommend the fried scallops, the fried clams, and the lobster, in that order. We ordered fried scallops and a lobster on this trip. The scallops were heaven-sent. The lobster was so naturally buttery-tasting that we didn’t even need to dip it in the melted butter vat that came with the meal. It wasn’t a cheap meal, but we enjoyed it immensely.

The wedding was scheduled for 15:00 in the afternoon on Sunday so after lunch we headed north to check into our hotel room in Cohasset, where the reception would be held. We stayed at the Red Lion Inn, which had a veneer of classiness and prices designed to pinch wedding attendees. We changed into our wedding clothes, hopped in the car again, and drove off to the wedding.

At this point, I’m going to address our rental car. We put over 400 miles on that car over the course of the weekend, so we got to know it fairly well. It was a Chevy Cobalt, rented from Enterprise, that came with an option package I like to call Electric Nothing. No power door locks, no power windows, no cruise. It wasn’t terribly spacious or comfortable nor was it fun to drive or pleasing to the eye. It automatically turned on the parking lights (not daytime running lights) when the car was started and those lights stayed on unless or until the driver turned them off. It had a four cylinder engine that got roughly the same gas mileage as our six cylinder Toyota Avalon does. It’s no wonder that GM can’t compete with the Civic and the Corolla if this is its weapon of choice. I wanted to hang a sign in the window that read “It’s not mine; it’s a rental” so that people wouldn’t think I was one oar short of a pair and try to take advantage of me after seeing my ride.

The wedding was a wedding. It was Catholic, so we all got plenty of exercise going up, down, up, down, up down. In the end, a couple got hitched at the altar, so everyone went home happy.

Monday morning, in Sarah’s words, I needed to be “dried out” so we packed up our stuff, hit Dunkin’ Donuts for the sixtieth time on the trip, and headed for the beach.

Let me digress again to address our frequent Dunkin’ Donuts stops. I don’t remember exactly how many times we stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts, but even before we left home I planned to stop there often enough that I brought a reusable Dunkin’ Donuts travel mug with me from Madison. We always enjoy mingling with the locals at Dunkins (as they are sometimes known) and the coffee is good, too.

We went back to Scituate/Humarock (another twenty or thirty miles on the car, of course), found a one hour parking spot (that we occupied for hours), and proceeded to soak up the sun on the beach. Rather, I soaked up the sun on the beach while Sarah froze various parts of her anatomy in the icy cold waters. Normally, I’m ready to leave the beach after ten or fifteen minutes, but that day I would have stayed for hours. We had been go-go-going for days so it was nice to take a couple of hours and just relax in the sun. We had lunch at the Sands End Cafe again (seafood, of course), before heading back out to the beach for some more relaxation. In a complete reversal of normality, Sarah was ready to leave the beach before I was, but we eventually packed up our stuff and headed back north in the Precambrian Chevy Cobalt.

We spent Monday night at Sarah’s friend’s house in Cambridge again. After dropping off the car early Tuesday morning, we caught the T back to the airport and several hours later we were back in Madison.

Sarah's Grandmother's House

Tuesday morning, we put our gear back in the car, and headed east, but in two cars. Sarah was driving her mother’s car to Pennsylvania so that her parents would have another vehicle for their use if they needed it.

After an uneventful five hour trip, we arrived at her grandmother’s house.

At this point, I should mention that Ohio and Pennsylvania really throw an inhospitable spring. Both states were cold, rainy, and gray. While we were driving from Ohio to eastern Pennsylvania, we drove through mountains still covered in snow with temperatures in the thirties. Wisconsin is no garden of Eden, but we generally have better weather.

As you can see, Sarah’s grandmother lives in a modest brick house that isn’t any bigger than ours, and since all the bedrooms were occupied, we needed to sleep somewhere outside of the house. We’ve tried sleeping in hotels with Dalla before, and it is hard to label such an experience “sleeping” without stretching the traditional definition of that word beyond all recognition. Dalla spends all night barking at slamming car doors, conversation in the hallway, and people coming and going from surrounding rooms. Since we weren’t eager to repeat such an experience, and we had all the gear, we decided to give camping a go.

Our Campsite

Caledonia State Park was open and accepting campers, so we targeted the campground for at least a night or two of camping. If it turned out to be too cold and uncomfortable, we would try to find a hotel, but our goal was to spend as many nights as possible in our tent.

As it turned out, we had a very pleasant camping experience. The nights were definitely cold with temperatures in the lower forties and upper thirties (we got snow the first night, that melted when it hit the ground), but if you’re tucked into a down sleeping bag with a stocking cap on your head, you don’t even notice the cold. In fact, I woke up one night because I was actually too warm and was sweating in my bag. Dalla sleeps quite well in a tent for some reason, so we didn’t have to worry about her making a big fuss every night. In fact, the only downside to having her in the tent was that she kept trying to steal my sleeping bag. Apparently, a down bag is better for sleep than her expansive, comfortable dog bed that took up a disproportionate share of the tent.

In addition to being cheap ($16/night), the campground was quiet and nearly deserted. All of your disruptive, loud-music-playing, late-night-car-door-slamming, bathroom-destroying yahoos are still at home and most other campers have a very narrow season (read: summer) in which camping seems like a good idea. There was one woman besides Sarah in the camp, and maybe seven or eight guys besides myself. That meant no problems getting in the shower or letting Dalla wander freely around the campsite.

We really enjoyed our stint at the campground though certain members of our families definitely thought we were insane for camping in mid-April and they tried several times to tell us just how insane we were (though to their credit, they never used the word insane or any of its synonyms). Yeah, there isn’t much vegetation to offer shade and there certainly any campground programs put on by rangers, but there also aren’t any bugs and you’re not likely to be camping next to the entire cast of Animal House.

Thursday afternoon, we started our journey back to Madison. We drove to Cleveland and spent the night at Sarah’s parents’ house to avoid further dog drama between Dalla and Zee. The next morning, we set out for the eight-plus hour drive back to Madison. We finally arrived in town about 19:00 on Friday evening.

Some thoughts that don’t fit the above narrative.

• Ohio and Indiana: Welcome to the twentieth century. Care to join the rest of us in the twenty-first? Electronic tolling is the future in those states. Too bad that Illinois, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania, New York, and other states with toll roads beat you to it. Tickets are archaic and outdated but that hasn’t stopped either state from handing them out by the millions. Once you go electronic, you never go back. If you’ve gotta pay a toll, being able to roll right through the toll plaza without stopping (or even slowing down in some cases), is slick. It doesn’t matter if the weather is cold and rainy, because you don’t have to stop, roll down your window, and carefully hand over some bills and change; money is simply deducted from an account that you maintain. I was initially skeptical of electronic tolling, but this trip really cemented its utility and convenience in my mind.
• When ordering decaf coffee, you cannot exercise too much vigilance to make sure that you actually get decaf.
• Pennsylvania: Why are seemingly all the service plazas on your toll road closed simultaneously? What genius came up with that bright idea? Quite frankly, they don’t provide much in the way of service when they’re closed.
• Illinois: As if I needed one more reason to avoid living there, the traffic around Chicago is it. The state’s open road tolling deserves commendation and their service plazas are open (take note, Pennsylvania), clean, and modern. None of that offsets the miles of stopped traffic that we saw while driving through the area. It was merely good luck on our part that all of that stopped traffic was trying to go the other way and that we weren’t caught up in it.