My Indiana Home(s)

STATES VISITED: Ohio / Indiana

I was determined to get a picture of the welcome sign to Indiana. I knew that there was one -- we saw an image of it last night at the Reds game, in the between-innings video game where the three cars race around Cincinnati (in New York, it's subway trains). But I got nervous that I'd miss it behind all those semis, lumbering up the hills of southern Ohio, so Hugh shot this sign of the highway marker to Indianapolis. Then, a couple miles farther on, here came the Indiana sign:


Heh, heh, sorry it's so blurry. What do you expect out of the window of a speeding car? But doofus-y as it sounds, this sight actually made me want to sing "Back Home Again in Indiana," a song so quintessentially cornball you should have a straw boater and cane to sing it. (Don't worry, I refrained from treating my carload of family to such a cheesy performance.)

For me, this 24-hour blitz through Indianapolis was the most important part of this trip. I hadn't been back to my hometown for 18 years; this was long overdue. It was essential to let my children see this part of my life, to connect some images to the stories I'd been telling them. Even more, it was essential for me to remind myself where I've come from.

We're staying at a perfectly pleasant Homewood Suites out by Keystone in the Crossing, which was just a cornfield when I was growing up. I have absolutely no connection to the glossy chain-store agglomeration that has sprouted around this intersection. It could be anywhere in America. A Crate and Barrel? A Borders Books? A Bed Bath and Beyond? All very well and good, but utterly beside the point for me.

No, I was on a mission to show my kids every house that I ever lived in. Mind you, this is no quick task. My dad was a real-estate lawyer; we went to open houses every Sunday afternoon just for the fun of it; we were always getting enamored of some new home, some fresh yard, some better school district, some altered visions of ourselves. My family lived in 7 different houses during the 21 years I lived at home. Today we saw them all.

First came this little bungalow at 56th and Carrollton, where my parents were a young couple starting out, with just my toddler brother Holt and baby me. I have no memories of living here, although I walked by it many times in later years. All those fussy trees around the front are new (and by new I mean over the past 40 years). Even the big tree was barely more than a sapling when I first lived here.






When I was around three we moved to this place on Central Avenue, an exceedingly bland name for a beautiful street, lined with the sort of solid baronial homesteads that Indianapolis excels at. I do remember living here, when it was a modest little yellow dwelling with a screened porch across the front. (Holt's imaginary friend Heaps Cronin lived under the porch.) That dense screen of trees to the left wasn't there then -- I know because I was allowed to run by myself over to the neighbors' yard to have tea with Tina Gerlib and her mom. Mrs. Gerlib was Canadian, I think, which in Indiana qualifies you as an exotic.



Just before I entered kindergarten we moved to this house on Washington Boulevard. I remember this house in vivid and distinct detail. Of all the places we lived, this one has changed the least. Why would anyone change it? It's a splendid little house, with that copper-roofed bay window and the leaded-glass windows embellished with tiny crests and diamond-shaped panes. This is the house I "ran away" from one evening when I was four, scaring the bejeebers out of my poor mother (my dad was out of town). But I told her before I left that I was just going around the corner to Hammakers' Drugstore, where we went every day to buy candy. I put my shoes on myself (on the wrong feet, granted) and I had been memorizing the route for days. I was always good with directions.

When we lived in that house, I went to P.S. 70. I remember walking there every day, with older boys -- "traffic boys" with special white belts -- to help guide us little kids across the street. P.S. 70 always had a great carnival, and I had the best second grade teacher ever, Miss Pollack.




The next house was probably the best, a rambling 1920s-era manor on Meridian Street, the prime Indianapolis residential street, running straight as an arrow down the center of town. We moved here when I was just about to start second grade, which meant I had to be the new kid in school. Misery. But it was a fabulous house -- at last I had my own bedroom and didn't have to share with my annoying baby sister Buffie any more. (Hi Buff!) We had a back stairway and a dumb waiter and there was a balcony off my bedroom. A huge sunken garden in back, too. We renovated this house substantially inside -- at one point we had our old bathtub sitting on the front lawn for weeks. (I'll bet that was real popular with our Meridian Street neighbors.) The new owners haven't changed it much outside but they added these big bushes in front, so we had to drive up the driveway to get this shot. Sorry, folks!

Here's P.S. 84, where I went to grade school when we lived on Meridian. (We lived there for 7 years, so I finished grade school at #84 and then went on to Broad Ripple High School). The local Catholic school, Immaculate Heart of Mary, faced #84 on the other side of the street. John Hiatt went to Immaculate Heart; when I got from an autograph from him after a show one night, I mentioned that I'd gone to #84 and he laughed. "You were going to hell," he told me. "The nuns always told us those kids across the street were going to hell." Funny -- when we looked out our windows at Immaculate Heart, all we could see was a door flying open and some kid running for his life with a nun running behind, wimple flying, brandishing a ruler.

I tried to get a picture of Broad Ripple, but it's really hard to capture this tan brick hulk with an ordinary camera from the street. This was part of the fortress-like addition they built when I was there, adding lots of windowless interior classrooms where kids went stir-crazy. In movies, they always portray high school as a hormone-addled hell house of clueless teachers and vicious social competition, but for me it was paradise. The two things that mattered here were student publications and choral music -- talk about playing to my strengths! I apologize now to all the kids who oozed through 4 years at Ripple despising me for being a top student, multiple award-winner, and yearbook queen, with my magic Riparian hall pass that could get me out of any class. I don't remember asking for it -- after being ostracized in grade school for being in "special" (the gifted and talented class), it was astonishing in high school that being smart actually counted for something.

In a world of haves and have-not, in Ripple I was the ultimate have. Couldn't get a date, of course, but that seemed a fair trade-off to me; I had great friends to hang out with, anyway, and here is where we hung out. I knew I had to take the kids to Steak and Shake; best burgers ever. Of course, in high school, we never actually ate there, we just drove around the parking lot to see who else was there. One night Dave Crichlow and Tim Harmon and Beth Wood and I set out to do 500 laps around the parking lot -- the Steak and Shake 500. We probably only did about 20 laps before we realized nobody but us thought it was funny. But we thought it was hysterical.

House #4 (I told you there were a lot) was our brief experiment in building our own house. My mother designed this as a New England saltbox, in the middle of a new development that had been a cornfield not long before -- which meant it was way out in the new suburbs, and hence in another school district. (I got special permission to keep going to Broad Ripple.) The house was sage green when we lived there, but I like the new color scheme. I remember that this house's walls were so thin, they shook when the wind blew, as it often did across that flat bare tract. There were no trees at all on the lot when it was built. I'm relieved to see that they've finally grown in.

I was already in college when the fam moved to this place just off north College, in a development called Windcombe. It's been altered so much, I had to drive past three or four times before I was sure this was it. (It didn't help that my mother gave me the wrong address. Hi Mom!) They filled in the breezeway, converted the old garage, and built a new garage behind it. I guess my parents were beginning to downsize at this point, with two kids already off at college; I think they were also tired of living with their own construction mistakes in the new-built house. This place was solid, solid, solid. I don't think they were here long; I can't even remember what my bedroom looked like. I do remember that we were living here when we got our cats Nuki and Abby, and I remember Buffie's friend Sally Harvey lived across the street.

The last Indianapolis house I ever lived in: The house on East 70th, in Arden. My mother had been lusting to find a place in Arden for years. As it turns out, this was the house that Wally Dortch lived in when we were in high school together. I was ready to graduate from college when we moved here, but I do remember the interior very clearly -- a classic 1950s layout, mostly on one level, with a long wing of bedrooms. Tiny yard, but then, with grown kids, who needs a big yard? The house never felt small to us, but obviously later owners thought so because they added an entire new wing (the whole bit over the garage). The immense old tree that used to stand there toppled during a windstorm when we lived there, falling right between my parents' cars. We lived here when my brother got married -- I remember taking photos in the yard.

So there's my Indianapolis life in houses. Bob asked me what there was to see in Indianapolis, and that's what I answered: Houses. But I'm not being facetious -- to me that's this city's great secret, its livability. People sink their money into roomy, handsome homes set on large lots -- for a city this size it has an incredible stock of them, on the North Side at least. (And to me, the North Side IS Indianapolis.) Yes, it has a beautiful downtown, which we drove around -- not much of a skyline, but impressive public plazas and mighty civic buildings made of gleaming Indiana limestone, all centered around the slender obelisk of the Monument. There are all sorts of new visitor attractions downtown, around the revitalized canal, which were developed long after I left town. But when I come to Indianapolis, what I need to do is to slake my lifelong hunger for looking at beautiful houses and wondering what's inside.

What's High in the Middle and Round on Both Ends

STATES VISITED: West Virginia / Ohio / Kentucky

There's always the stuff you've forgotten on your trip -- you're just lucky if it turns out not to be critical. We were halfway across the George Washington Bridge on Day One when I realized that I'd forgotten the bottles of sunscreen and bugspray I'd bought specifically to take with us. No biggie, right? But over the next couple days it became clear that other things had been forgotten -- underwear, swim suits, a soccer ball for pre-season training -- so first thing this morning we headed to a Wal-Mart in Triadelphia,WV, to remedy the matter. Those gigantimundo stores always send me into a spaced-out fugue state; I can wander around for hours, filling my jumbo shopping cart with things I don't need just because they are so incredibly cheap. And this Wal-Mart was a special super-sized one, so getting out was even more of a challenge. The rest of the suburban hilltop was loaded with other brand-new chain stores with empty parking lots -- kinda spooky. If we weren't on a schedule, we would have checked out the immense Cabela's that dominated the hilltop: The World's Largest Outdoor Outfitters. It looked like the kind of place even Daniel Boone would get lost in. I'm sure it would have been a perfect way to cap our West Virginia experience. But, well, miles to go and all that....

As soon as we crossed the state line into Ohio, we noticed that the hills were becoming gentler and the sky wider. Beautiful Ohio farmland -- what a welcome sight to me. The highway ribboned out straight before us, lapping up the rolling landscape as we powered across I-70 to Columbus, which always impressed me as a kid on our family car drives east. It still has one of the best skylines in the Midwest, I think. No Rust Belt decay here, at least from what we could tell from an hour's quick stop-off for lunch.



Hugh was interested in seeing Columbus mainly because he wanted to check out the Nationwide Arena, where the Columbus Blue Jackets hockey team plays. So we did. Of course since it isn't hockey season now we couldn't go inside, but the pilgrimage was duly made. (Oh, please don't tell me that after we've made all this effort to help Hugh cross off all the major-league baseball stadiums on his life list, now he's going to start on the hockey arenas too.)





From there we headed southwest to Cincinnati. (Isn't it cool how Ohio has a city in every corner -- Cleveland in the northeast, Toledo in the northwest, Cincinnati in the southwest, and . . . well, the southeast corner kinda gets cut off, doesn't it? But then there are Columbus and Dayton in the middle, too, all those solid mid-sized cities, each holding their own. I love Ohio.)

The drive south from Columbus ran through more fertile farmland -- broad fields of corn, soybeans, alfafa, each a slightly different texture, a slightly different shade of green, a vast tapestry of croplands. Bob keeps remarking on how flat it is, but I don't know, I like it flat. Sorry, but this is what I think countryside should look like.


Here's a beautiful white barn we saw on the road to Cincinnati.





We had a little incident with the GPS -- or Ms. Garmin, as we now call her -- who started sending us north on I-75 as we were just starting to get into Cincinnati proper. Then she pretended she hadn't screwed up and kept saying "Recalculating. Recalculating" as if it was OUR fault. The little minx.

We finally got into Cincinnati and checked into the downtown Westin by 4:30, which meant I had to scramble to get down the street to the Underground Railroad Museum, which closes at 5. Hard to believe it, but I couldn't talk any of the kids into coming with me. The nice folks at the desk let me in free because the place was just about to close. I breezed through the exhibits, wishing I'd had time to stop and read every plaque and watch every haunting video. I saw some intriguing artifacts -- old rusty manacles, a reconstructed log cabin, raggedy dresses -- and dramatic dioramas. Not surprisingly, this museum considers John Brown a visionary hero, and displays the photographs of him that look like Abraham Lincoln instead of the really wild-eyed shots. It's a cool museum, though -- I'm glad I had at least 20 minutes there. I'd have kicked myself if I'd missed it entirely.

The Westin is just a couple blocks from the riverfront, which means we could walk to the ballpark for the Reds game tonight. First, though, we had to walk across the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky, just so we could say we'd visited Kentucky. We took the old Cincinnati-Covington suspension bridge, which we learned was built by John Roebling, the same guy who did the much longer Brooklyn Bridge a couple years later. You can definitely see the resemblance.





Having officially touched Kentucky soil, we headed back across the river and joined the crowds flowing into the ballpark, which has a great riverfront location. It's a pretty new ballpark, I think, and it's well-designed from what I can tell, if perhaps a bit generic. It's called the Great American Ballpark, which seems like pretty bold talk until you figure out that it's underwritten by the Great American Insurance company across the street.

Here are the kids and Bob at our seats, which were on the first base line. I have to say that the stadium seemed awfully big; it was only about half full, although on a weeknight this early in the season, with the Reds not leading their division, I guess it's not surprising it wasn't packed. But what do I know? I've gotten too used to Yankee Stadium, I guess.

My dad was always a huge Reds fan, so I had to think of him, and how much he would have enjoyed knowing we were at a Reds game.

One cool feature of the park was the pavilion across the outfield from home plate, which is rigged up to look like an old-timey riverboat. You can't really see that in the picture, but here's a close-up of these smokestacks. When the crowd sings the Star Spangled Banner, on the line "the bombs bursting in air," red fireworks shoot out of the smokestacks. Nice touch.

The Reds have been around since 1869, which is pretty impressive. They were originally known as the Redlegs, so their big-head mascot is Mr. Redlegs. We loved his handlebar mustache. The kids are convinced that this is like Conan O'Brian's fantasy image of old-timey baseball players.

The Reds ended up losing the game -- their pitcher, Bronson Arroyo, just didn't seem to have any stuff tonight, and the pitcher for the Diamondbacks, Dan Haren, was much better. The D-backs are the bottom of their division and the Reds in the middle of theirs, but that's the thing I love about baseball: On any one night, any team can beat any other teams, if the stars are aligned right. That's why the World Series needs seven games, I guess. Anyhow, there were a few exciting moments in the later innings, once the starting pitchers were gone and things got a little edgier, but in the end the Diamondbacks won, 6-2.

The highlight of the evening for me? I got to try a Skyline Chili cheese coney. Skyline Chili is the biggest chain selling Cincinnati's most beloved local food, chili. It's the Official Chili of the Cincinnati Reds, naturally. They even display bowls of chili for that between-innings video game on the jumbotron where you're supposed to pick which of three identical images is hiding the baseball.

I don't know if everybody in Cincinnati is really a chili fan or if that's just visitors bureau guff. All I can say is that I finally got a chance to try some Skyline Chili on my hot dog, and it was absolutely lip-smacking delicious.

John Brown's Body

STATES VISITED: West Virginia / Virginia / Maryland / Pennsylvania

We hauled the teenagers out of bed today at 8:30am, probably the earliest they've had to get up all summer. But sorry, kids, this ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around. We had hikes to hike and historic landmarks to mark, and time was a-wasting. (Must be something about being in West Virginia that gets me talking like Pearl Bodine.)

First off -- well, after the Froot Loops and muffins from the motel's breakfast bar -- there were battlefields to tramp around, in this case the Murphy Farm, a.k.a. the Chambers Farm, as it was known in 1862 when the Confederates set up their cannon in the hayfields to rout the Union forces. Stonewall Jackson's finest hour, apparently. The view of the Shenandoah valley from the farm is truly spectacular:

That's looking upriver towards Maryland. West Virginia was still Virginia in 1862, which just confuses all this history even more. It's pretty amazing to think that these soldiers hauled those heavy guns up these steep ravines from the Shenandoah River; I could barely drag my handbag uphill (though god knows how much I've got in that purse). The Union forces never expected they'd be coming from the south -- never underestimate the power of surprise.



The Union troops were a little farther north, in the town of Bolivar (it used to be called Mud Fort before the townsfolk changed the name to capitalize on the romantic image of Simon Bolivar, the "George Washington of South America"). Here's the Union troops' defensive position, looking south towards the Blue Ridge:

Walking around old battlefields may not be everybody's cup of tea, but we get a kick out of it. It's a good excuse for an hour's hike, anyway.

This is really is a gorgeous part of the country, I have to say. I'm sure my pictures don't do it justice.

And then of course there's the obligatory staring-down-the-cannon-barrel shot. For some reason this absolutely never gets old.

It really was ironic to see those Union cannons trained on that little gap in the trees, blindly pointing the other direction from the farm we'd just visited, where A.P. Hill and his men (not to mention his own big guns) were massing all the while, behind the Union flank. At the end of this battle, over 12,000 U.S. troops surrendered to Stonewall Jackson, a record that was not surpassed until World War II. Then apparently the Confederate troops withdrew from Harper's Ferry a few months later and the Union took it over again anyway. Go figure.

I can't claim to be much of an expert on this history, mind you; I'm only telling you what we learned this morning from Park Ranger David Fox, who delivered a genuinely impressive 45-minute overview of Harper's Ferry's colorful past, beginning back with George Washington, who surveyed the land as a young Virginia surveyor, and Thomas Jefferson, who sat on a rock here exulting over the view of the Potomac gap.

Here is a picture of my son Tom sitting on that selfsame rock, ignoring the view while he is texting friends on his cell phone:

Washington was the one who decreed that one of the two U.S. armories should be built here, where there were local iron and lumber for raw materials, and water power to run the gun factory works. If Washington hadn't located the armory here, then abolitionist firebrand John Brown wouldn't have come here to try to swipe guns to arm all the escaped slaves he was planning to help to freedom.

This John Brown stuff is the aspect of Harper's Ferry history that got me the most intrigued. It sure is a bizarre story. And where there's a bizarre story, what better way to tell it than a cheesy wax museum? Don't get me wrong, the John Brown Wax Museum is perfectly respectable as wax museums go, but all wax museums are by definition inherently cheesy, aren't they? So of course we had to visit it. Here's a fuzzy photo of my favorite tableau in the place, the denouement of Brown's crazy raid on the federal armory. Note: Brown is the kneeling figure in the tan coat, cradling in his lap his dying son who he dragged into this escapade.
I get the idea that Brown was, to put it delicately, a bleeding nut case. His goals may have been perfectly admirable, but his methods were highly suspect. In the end, he got half of his 21 men killed (did he really think he could pull off this raid with just 21 men?) and got himself hung for treason. He was tried, all right, but it doesn't look to me like this could possibly have been a fair trial -- it took place just a few weeks after the raid, when Brown himself was still suffering from wounds received in the skirmish. I'll bet it was a zoo, the 19th-century version of the OJ trial. On the other hand, Brown's lunatic raid helped to ignite the Civil War, which eventually did end slavery, so maybe he knew what he was doing after all.

Harper's Ferry has been basically a national park since the 1940s; only about 300 hundred people live here now, most of who seem to be running gift shops or selling ice cream. Nice gift shops, mind you, and delicious ice cream. It's a cool little town and we enjoyed poking around. A lot of the shops are gussied up to look like they did in the 1850s, but right now they've just got fake displays in the windows. I'd like it even better if more of them were fitted up with repro merchandise and costumed shopkeepers. You know the drill -- the fake print shop, the fake blacksmith's forge, the fake general store. I love historic restorations. I love costumed interpreters too, but they were in short supply today. We saw exactly 3 women in long skirts and bonnets and one Civil War soldier walking around for the benefit of the educational programs. Maybe there would have been more if we'd come on a weekend. I'll bet they've got loads of them organized for John Brown's 150th anniversary later this year.


Oh, and one other cool thing about Harper's Ferry -- it's the mid-point of the Appalachian Trail. We ran into at least a handful of hikers with their walking sticks and backpacks, though they didn't look grubby enough to have come all the way up from Georgia or down from Maine. After reading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, I'm ready for every Appalachian Trail hiker to be mud-coated and wild-haired and stinky.

Mid-afternoon, we bid Harper's Ferry adieu and headed on toward Wheeling, West Virginia. The road we drove on, I-68, running from Cumberland MD to Wheeling, was called the National Freeway -- apparently, in 1806 Thomas Jefferson ordered the first federal road to be built along this route, linking the Potomac and Ohio rivers. (This fact I picked up from the great book I'm reading right now, Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure by Matthew Algeo -- more on that tomorrow.) It was a beautiful highway with hardly any cars on it -- mostly just a handful of 18-wheelers laboring up these long inclines and huffing around the curves. I was driving so I didn't get to soak up the long blue-misted mountain views, and the other folks in the car were snoozing so they didn't see them either. So much for seeing America...

Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line

STATES VISITED: Pennsylvania / Maryland / Virginia / West Virginia

Before we left Bethlehem this morning, we did the obligatory spin through the old steel mills neighborhood. (I've written about this derelict site, once the proud home of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, in my book 500 Places to See Before They Disappear.) Bob's father and all his uncles worked here for years; Bob himself had a summer job here as a janitor. Good incentive to go to college, you gotta say that for it. After the steel went bust, the smokestacks went cold and the mills stood empty for several years, big rusting ghosts in the center of town. I guess you could say they have their own weird poetry:
Finally, the Sands Casino rehabbed one of the old mills and recently opened it for business, offering nonstop slot action. Bob's sisters have been talking about this for ages, and I have to admit I was skeptical about it ever really happening. Well, it did, and this was our first chance to finally see it. I'm not sure this is exactly what this economically depressed area needs, but I have to give them props for the clever adaption of the industrial site. They've hung their blazing red logo on an old railroad crane across the entrance:
After that we drove out to the site of Bob's other summer job -- the Saucon Valley Country Club, where he used to caddy for the rich steel executives as they busily charmed clients into buying American steel. If this course hadn't been such a plum place to play golf, the U.S. steel mills might have gone belly-up years earlier. It's such a great course, it seems that they're having the U.S. Women's Open there right now -- at any rate we saw this giant merchandise tent set up at the edge of the course:
The real reason for going past the country club, though, is to drive on Saucon Valley Road, which has a fantastic series of whoopdedoo bumps -- if you drive fast enough (and we always do), it's like riding on a roller coaster. Ticklebelly Road, the kids call it. Well, I guess if you grow up in Bethlehem, you need to have something to do in the car on a Saturday night . . . .

* * * * *

We headed west on I-78 towards Reading, then followed I-81 south. By the time we needed to stop for lunch, we were at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Its main claim to fame as far as we're concerned is Dickinson College. Hugh applied to Dickinson and got accepted, but he'd never actually visited the campus. Everyone told us it was beautiful, and they were right -- what a little gem, an ensemble of neat fieldstone buildings set around a shady quadrangle with these red Adirondack chairs plopped down on the grass. Here are the kids, buddying up to the statue of physician Benjamin Rush, Dickinson's founder. He looks like he's about to drop his book on Grace's head, doesn't he?
They have this cool new science building too --
After a very respectable lunch at the Gingerbread Man (we enjoyed watching Wimbledon on TV, then we saw the US pull ahead of Brazil in the FIFA Confederations Cup -- a game I'm told the US eventually lost) we had a little walk around town. Favorite pic of the day, taken behind one of the local churches:
* * * *

Heading south on I-81 toward Maryland, we decided to try out the GPS system that came with the rental car. I swear, our GPS voice had a speech impediment. "At the next light, turn bleft," the robot lady said. "In five hundred yards, turn bright." (As if we weren't already bright enough...). We had to turn off the voice part, it was driving us so crazy. The GPS gods, however, sent us on a different route than the one the Google map gods had decreed, which caused a momentary short circuit in our navigational peace of mind. We went with the GPS edict, mostly because the GPS gadget was actually in the car with us and could have turned vicious at any minute. It ended up being serendipitous, though, because that route led us through the quaint town of Boonsboro, Maryland, which was founded by some cousins of Daniel Boone, distant ancestors of mine. It's the kind of town that has log cabins on the main street with gift shops inside -- it sounds hokey but honestly looked cool. Then we cut across country and crossed the Potomac river into (briefly) the very tippy-top corner of Virginia, which we wouldn't have gone into if we'd gone the Google route. Boosting this trip's total of states, always a plus.

Our destination: Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, set at the strategic confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, where abolitionist rabble-rouser John Brown convinced a gang of like-minded freedom fighters to attack the federal armory in October 1859. As the front desk clerk at the Comfort Suites informed us, this year is the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid -- "Or maybe the 150th anniversary of him getting hung. Great. Let's celebrate this guy getting killed, that sounds like fun." I'm glad to know that cynicism is alive and well in West Virginia.

After dumping our gear at the Comfort Suites -- a marvel of chain-motel predictability, not that there's anything wrong with that -- we went into the historic district for dinner. All the costumed reenactors have gone home for the night and the cutesy gift shops are closed, but we had a decent dinner at the Secret Six Tavern, which commemorates six New England abolitionists who secretly funded Brown's activities. Walking along the tavern wall looking at the steel engravings of those guys' faces, I discovered that one of them was Samuel Gridley Howe, who, um, I'm pretty sure is another ancestor of mine. This DAR stuff can be embarrassing sometimes . . . .

O Little Town...

STATES VISITED: New York / New Jersey / Pennsylvania

I expected, realistically, we'd finally get going by 2pm. My husband, Bob, imagined we'd be off by 10am. My son Hugh rolled his eyes and predicted it'd be 4 in the afternoon before we left.

Guess who won.

But there are so many things to do before you take off for a trip, even more if it's going to be a long one. There's the rental car to pick up, the prescriptions you'll need while you're gone to get from the pharmacy, the last trip to the grocery to lay in cleaning supplies for the house cleaner, the last last trip to the grocery to stock up on road snacks. (At least I could send my sons to do that one -- they are excellent road snack buyers.) Then there's the instructions to leave for the catsitter, the money to leave for the house cleaner, the final bag of kitchen garbage to set out, the last load of dishes to run in the dishwasher (and wait to make sure it completes the cycle without blowing up). The beds to be made, because I hate coming home to a messed-up bedroom. The children to be nagged into making their own beds, because they do not mind coming home to a messed-up bedroom. The pile of bills to be mailed. The keys to be left with the doorman. The windows to be shut, the lights to be turned off. It's a wonder we got off by 4pm, really.

Here's the kids and the car:
In their infinite wisdom, National Car Rental decided to give us not a Dodge Caravan, but a Toyota Sienna. Now, having just researched minivans (the lease on our Volvo runs out in a week), I happen to know that the Sienna has much worse safety ratings than comparable minivans. I am so glad that I know this now, as we are hurtling across I-80. I will say, however, that it's a pleasure, after that cramped back seat of the Volvo, to luxuriate in the space of this minivan. Sitting in the third row (what luxury to have a third row!), Tom noticed that the console between the seats of the middle row looks like a sad smiley-face:

Later Grace took a picture of the sad smiley-face with Hershey Kisses in the cupholders to look like eyeballs. Every time we hit a curve, the sad smiley-face rolls its eyes. Hilarious, hunh? (I guess you had to be there.)

I reckon one of the reasons we weren't in such a burning hurry to leave is that our first stop is Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where Bob grew up and where his sisters still live; we couldn't really pass by without stopping overnight to see them. No check-in deadline, no stress about whether we'll get there in time to get connecting rooms, no worries about where we'll find to eat. We make this trip so often, it doesn't really feel like a vacation yet.

But it's always fun to hang with Bob's sisters. After dinner (a very tasty Italian restaurant way off the highway that we'd never have found if we didn't know people in town), we played Scrabble and watched Notorious on TV and then taught Hugh how to play Hearts. Card games seem such an archaic skill; in the Xbox era, nobody plays cards anymore. He's a fast learner; by the second round he beat everybody's butt. A fine skill to pick up for college.

To bed at 2am. We definitely have to get on a proper schedule once the trip really starts.