From about age two to four, my family lived in a town called Whitewater, Wisconsin, where my dad taught at the University of Wisconsin there. My mom couldn’t remember our address, but as we had decided to head north from Illinois, I thought it would be fun to take a brief detour into the town. We found Frosty’s there, and had some frozen custard.
Here is the sign at the main entrance to the campus there:
Today, we made a visit to Heritage Manor,
the nursing home where my grandmother (Nonna — Italian for grandmother) lives. Seven years ago, when we were last out this way, Tyler was an infant and Nonna was (at age 91) still living in the home that her husband built for them.
Nonna looks pretty good for 98,
and certainly seems to be in better health than most of the people in the home. It’s not always easy to understand her, but that was true for me 30 years ago as well, as her English is tinged with an Italian accent, that being her native tongue. She is somewhat hard of hearing as well.
We had a nice visit with Nonna. I was able to show her pictures from our trip so far, although I hadn’t thought to bring any pictures of her daughter, my mom, along. We stayed for about half an hour, and then it was time for her lunch. Thanks to one of the staff, we found a nice park nearby to have a picnic lunch with the groceries we had bought in town earlier.
After lunch, we headed back for another visit, and stayed for about an hour. We brought Nonna down to the solarium, to give her roommate a bit of peace. Susan played the guitar a little, and we sang a few songs while the kids drew pictures for Nonna. She was looking a little tired, and after a couple of pictures our visit came to an end.
This morning finds us awakening in Morris, IL at the Comfort Inn. Morris is home to the Dresden Nuclear Generating Plant, and I did a little research to see how far away from us it is, but it would take about half an hour to get there. Would love to drive by and at least take pictures for Susan’s dad, but it is in exactly the wrong direction. Susan wanted to go get a few groceries last night and asked where there was a supermarket, and was given directions to the local WalMart. But we have sworn off WalMarts and fast food for the whole trip. Groceries will have to wait.
And by the way, the title is just a reference to the famed Morris the Cat; no disrespect meant to the town.
Today, we drove from Ann Arbor, MI to Morrtis, IL, en route to Peru to visit with my 98 year old grandmother. We flew out to IL about five years ago to visit, and she was still in her own home in Oglesby back then, but the morning before we arrived to visit, she had taken a fall and was all alone for a time until my uncle arrived before us. That was what finally convinced everyone that she needed to be in a nursing home. So today we will be visiting her there.
Along the way from Ann Arbor, we had a lovely stop in St. Joseph, MI at the Curious Kids museum, after lunch at a local sandwich shop.
Before we left town, we let the kids take a dip in chilly Lake Michigan.
Plenty of billboards like this. Not as many as for fireworks, but still…
We had planned to hit the famous Kellogg’s Cereal City factory tour today, as it is one of the most celebrated on our route. But as Susan was reading the description to the kids at breakfast, she came to the end of the article which stated (paraphrasing) “This attraction is closed, but we’ve left the article here for your enjoyment.” Argh!
We’re now headed to the Curious Kids’ Museum in St. Joseph, MI. As an added bonus, we’ve already had our daily dose of rain, so we are sure to have a dry remainder of the day!
I mentioned the router before. One of the laptops that connects to the router acts mainly as a server, running tasks in the background, and sitting unobtrusively in the trunk. When everything is working well, I can take pictures from in and around the car, and the Eye-Fi card in the camera will send them wirelessly and automatically to the laptop. The laptop will then run a program which looks at the timestamp on the photo and compares it to a gps track log, and figures out where in the world we were at that time, and records geographical data in the picture metadata. The picture is then automatically uploaded to flickr. And when this doesn’t happen automatically, I attempt to do it manually afterward. So there are lots of pictures on flickr. If you want to scan the un-filtered album, point your browser over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/tastewar/tags/xctrip/
We didn’t make it as far yesterday as we had hoped, largely due to a lengthy wait to cross the border into Canada. Then a short while after we had made it, we ran into heavy traffic due to an accident. But when we got up this morning, the day looked fine, and we had a room in a hotel (Travelodge) right along the western shore of Lake Ontario.
After our “continental” breakfast (on what continent do they serve cellophane wrapped Sara Lee muffins? Oh, that would be North America…), we had a lovely walk along the shoreline, and took some fun pictures which I subsequently accidentally deleted. Argh. As we say in the software industry, that was a “cockpit error” and not a failure of technology.We then paid for liters of gasoline with Canadian dollars, extinguishing any hope of mentally converting the price. Best that way, probably. We followed the QEW to the 402, stopping briefly for some snacks at a grocery store
Then after crossing the border
