NY - Chicago in detail

CBS radio blares at 4:15 this morning. Rachel doesn’t move. I get up, and can already hear Jack rummaging in his room. He’s got a full day of work ahead of him. Our job is to drive 842 miles. Dad jogs down the stairs in his red Nike tank top, racquetball shorts and sneakers. American flag bandana, obvi. We embrace for the first of our many hugs in the next fifteen minutes.

A few minutes to load up the car, and we were on our way by 4:45. The light at the corner of Wolver Hollow and 25A took forever. Luckily the Brookville Police didn’t catch my illegal right on red.

Pennsylvania is big! And also very beautiful. We rode through the hills and valleys of the Pocono’s Mountains. Fog crept up through the valleys and sometimes across the highway. Before leaving the Keystone State, we made our first mini-venture to Sharon, PA. Born and raised in the small industrial town, my mom remembers it fondly. The evidence of a by-gone boom area was apparent in the beautiful building stock of Main Street and the current economic downturn was even more blatant in the same buildings’ shuttered doors and windows. An eerie stillness lingered in the emptiness of the town’s centre. It was hard not to comment on the upcoming election on our way out of town.

We crossed the Ohio border and were welcomed by a great sign. After that, nothing really happened for the next 8 hours. I read our atlas carefully and now I’m excited for the world’s largest flamingo in Lake Denton WI. We’ll be headed through there by the end of the week, so stay tuned for a picture. By the way, if you’re still reading this, you should probably updating your resume instead. The Buckeye state really didn’t offer much and neither does this post.

We celebrated passing through Ohio without a speeding ticket. The best of Indiana was the Indiana Dunes State Park. For about 5 miles of Lake Michigan coastline there are tremendous sand dunes! What a surprise! We stopped for about 30 minutes to wade in the lake, hike up a dune, and learn about a dune blowout. The park is located in a somewhat ironic spot: to the east you can see a nuclear power plant, and to the west, in Gary IN, a coal burning power plant.