Road Trip 2007: The Final Frontier

Or, you know, the final part. But I like "frontier" better. Anyhoo...

After leaving Grand Rapids (now two weeks ago, oh how behind I get!), I set off to visit SarahCool in Cincinnati. That's spelled with two N's, dont'cha know. ;-)

But. BUT! En route, I planned on making a few different stops. I had heard Ann Arbor was a pretty little town, so I wanted to go through there. But should I go east and south or south and east through Michigan? Well, a quick gander at google maps and I had my answer.

KALAMAZOO?!?!?! Really? There's actually a real live Kalamazoo? Dude, I wanna go THERE!!!!! I was rather excited by this fact. It's a neat little town, too. I dropped by a little festival, grabbed lunch and wandered around a bit. And got lost. In Kalamazoo. Now there's a headline I wouldn't have minded: "Lone tourist plucked from the streets of Kalamazo, cold, dehydrated, but with giant grin on face. Can't seem to stop saying 'KALAMAZOO!!!' "

I decided to had to have a souvenir, so what better to pick up than a KAZOO from KALAMAZOO? Good thing I did, too. It provided absolute minutes of entertainment in the car on my driving days. Apparently it also turned me into a pirate.

After Kalamazoo - KALAMAZOO! Go on, say it, it's fun! - I stopped in Ann Arbor and wandered around downtown for a bit. It's a very cute little town. I took some pictures, wandered the campus of Michigan State, and caved to the sweet pull of the Ben and Jerry's shop. Oh sweet Banana Split ice cream, where have you been all my life? Sheeshers, it's sure a good thing I did boot camp last month. Cause road trip = sit on your touckas and eat junk. Mmmm, banana spilt ice creamy goodness type junk.

I knew I wasn't gonna hit Cincinnati on Thursday, so I drove till I got tired and crashed in a roadside motel - notice I didn't say crashed INTO - then drove the final hour to Cinci the next day.

I had a few hours before I met up with Sarah, so I wandered around downtown a bit and took in the sights. I apparently took in some famous Cicnicnnati chili, too, without knowing it was famous. Mmmm, cheese coney. (I'm sorry, arteries!) I met Sarah at her work, recognizing the building from her blog posts. Now if THAT don't make a gal feel like a stalker....

The weekend was totally full but also really relaxing. I met a bunch of her girlfriends on Friday night, then on Saturday, Sarah took on the role of tour guide and showed me all over the city. She told all kinds of stories about the various places she's lived and worked, and I learned all kinds of neat-o information about the city. Like, for example, it used to be called Porkopolis. hehehe! And once I got the story of Skyline Chili, we went there and had a 4-way - spaghetti topped with chili, red beans, and habanero cheese, served with a side of oyster crackers. Yum! From downtown to Eden Park to Findlay Market to the mushroom house to ... many other places (Sarah, help me out with neighbourhood names!), it was a great tour! Sunday we took in the National Underground Railroad Museum, which was really interesting. As the Ohio river is bsically the border between the North and the South, that whole region played a really important role in the escape of slave from the South on their way to Canada. See? Ya come here and ya just might learn something! :-)

Roll your mouse over the pictures for a caption, or click for a larger view.
Saturday night we headed over to Sarah's aunt and uncle's place for a BBQ, which was SO MUCH FUN! They were funny and hospitable and sweet and welcomed me in right away. Yay!

Highlights would have to include Sarah's haircut:

Sarah: My bangs are crooked! SAM! You should cut them!
Sam (Sarah's 16 year old cousin): I dunno...
Sarah: Yeah! Totally! You just cut your dad's hair! Do it! Do it! Do it!
Sam: ... Ok...
{gets scissors, heads outside}
Sarah: SAM! Be careful!
Sam (who is masterfully pulling out Sarah's bangs and cutting just tiny bits off, doing quite a good job, and had just given his dad a very good haircut 45 mis before): [snip snip]
Sarah: AAAHH!!
Sam: [snip]
Sarah: Oooooooh!
Sam: Well YOU asked me to!...
Sarah: Eeeeeek!
Sam: [snip]
Sarah (fanning her face): OK, I'm hot. Stop! I wanna go inside!
Sam: [snip] There! I'm done.
Sarah: PHEW!

Also, pretty much Sarah's whole family hates her cat, Flora. I was caught in the middle of a Flora fight...

Sarah: Oh Flora! She's so sweeeet!
Sarah's family, eyes glinting, hoping to pull me over to the dark side: So! Do you hate Flora, too?
Hillary: uhhhmm....

Who WOULDN'T love a sweet creature like this?

What you DON'T see in the picture are the lasor beams of hate coming from her eyes. I was clearly in HER territory, and she was mad. BUT, Sarah.... She loves YOU, and that's what's important. And she had kinda sorta almost warmed up to me by the time I left. For example, she let me get close enough to pet her abuot 7 times. Some of those times she even knew it was me.

For the record. I LIKE Flora. She's got definite spunk and she makes her mommy happy. I just won't get too close to her. ;)

So. Cincinnati is cool, and chillin' with Sarah was a blast! It was fun to see a little slice of her world! I really am so grateful for my blog girls: Anne and Jean and Sarah!

Now it's just a matter of plotting to get them HERE for a visit! Muah hah hahaaa!!!!

Monday morning bright and early (5:50am, to be precise!) I started off for Toronto. Nine hours later (!!!) I arrived, took in some of the zoo - lions and tigers and bears, oh my! - and chilled with my friend Ann for the evening before catching an early flight back home.

Windsor, Toronto, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, Cincinnati. Nearly 3000km. Lots of pictures. Good times with friends all along the way...

Makes for a very happy Hillary!

Road Trip 2007, part trois

Oh man, I've fallen off the blogging bandwagon for a bit here. Been too busy whooping it up and driving all over creation...

My stay in Grand Rapids with Anne and Jean was awesome, of course! The first day I was there, I headed to Jean's house and hung out with her and her kiddies - seriously about the cutest kids you've ever seen. We had lunch, where I was grilled by Jean's 6 year old son, Sam, about what I was going to eat on my sandwich so he could copy it - I'm THAT cool! - and played all kinds of fun things downstairs. Basketball, colouring with Alina, who's three, jumping rope, tickle fights, lots of spinny rides ("Just one more! Pleeease???")... TOTALLY fun!

I of course had my camera out and so decided to show Sam how to take photos. It turned into a photo shoot extraordinaire, with exclamations of, "AWESOOOOME!" and "YOU LOOK LIKE A MOVIE STAR!" after every photo. The random photo of Anne's ear I think is my favourite.

That afternoon, Anne and I went for a pedicure and a wee shopping spree, and can I just say, she is the best shopper EVER. She finds deals on cute stuff like nobody's business. She is my hero! I got a whole load of stuff for SO CHEAP. Sah-weet!

Wednesday was beach day. What a production! It was the most glorious beach day I've had in quite some time, let me tell you. Anne made a PIE for the day, THAT'S how fantastic it was. Well, I kinda helped to make the pie. And kinda screwed it up. Nothing a sieve full of blueberries, flour, and brown sugar can't fix, I tells ya. Heh. Heh. Oh man, I'm such a dork. It still tasted great... a little extra sugar never hurt anyone!

Anne has friends who have access to a private beach on Lake Michigan, so we pretended to be residents and took our beach umbrellas, chairs, cooler full of yummies, and all things beach related down the stairs to claim our very own piece of heaven. White sand, blue water, a lake so big it reminds you of the ocean, yet without any pesky shells or barnacles to cut your feet or salty water to make you all... er... salty. And the water was WARM! (Yes, Anne and Jean, it was WARM! ;-) ) We sunned, we slept, we swam, all afternoon long. Gloriousness, I tell you. Sheer gloriousness.

We grabbed pizza in town at a little diner and headed home for some more serious hanging out. After a lazy morning Thursday, I was off to tootle my way down to Cincinnati...

Never has a justification of blogging been so important

Whenever you mention to someone that you have to use the 'facilities,' it's inevitable that somebody slyly tells you, "Whatever you do, don't think of rushing water!!!" Hardy har har.

Well can I just say this? Pretty much the worst place ev-ar to arrive at after a three hour drive and a very, very large tea is NIAGARA FALLS. I was hopping around like a maniac, battling THRONGS of people, wanting to scream at the world, "I hafta pee, I hafta pee, GET OUT OF MY WAAAAY!" But really, they wouldn't have heard me over the gush of millions of tons of water hurtling itself off a horseshoe shaped cliff.

It was a potty eeemerrrrgency.

But don't worry. I survived. My pants were only wet from the spray of the falls, I promise.

So. Err... moving right along...

After returning to normal human status once again, I really enjoyed the falls. I was considering skipping them for the sake of time, but I'm glad I didn't. The falls are spectacular. The surrounding crowds/town/hotels/casinos/rides/lookout towers/attractions/shops/midway/and various other money-munching monsters were a complete gong show, but hey, ya don't have to get pictures of that! *grin* I wanted to do a trip on the Maid of the Mist or the walk under the falls, but time was short, so I just enjoyed them from the top. Still pretty awesome.

After Niagara, I began my 9.5 hour trip to Grand Rapids. Just driving, it really should only have taken 6.5 hours, but I probably made about an hour's worth of stops (including one 15 minute detour when I somehow ended up on the wrong highway and had to backtrack - d'oh!) and T-W-O H-O-U-R-S at the border in Sarnia. Shooot.

There's a bridge to the states (as there are in lots of places, but I've never seen that, so it was kinda novel for me. Yes, I'm easily amused.) that was a toll bridge, so there began the ginormous lineup. An hour and a half of me battling sleep - I was there in my 4-6pm energy dip, and had been driving already pretty much all day - being bored out of my mind, and having no clue how far I still had to go, I FINALLY arrived at the booth, passport out and ready to go. But noooooo. This was just the TOLL booth. There's another lineup on the OTHER side of the bridge for customs.

Craaaaap!

It took two hours to get through altogether. I know that's not a huge deal, but I'd already been on the road since 8:30am, and it was about 7:15 when I finally got through. Raga! It would have gone by slightly faster had I not been the subject of a rather lengthy interrogation at the border:

- Where are you headed today?
Well today I'm going to Grand Rapids, then in a few days I'm headed to Cincinnati, then I come back to Toronto next Monday.
- And what is the purpose of your visit?
I'm visiting friends! :)
-And how do you know these friends
Uhm... well, I know them through my website.

And that, folks, is where things all went wrong.

- Your website? What kind of website?
It's blog.
-What's a blog?
Well, it's kind of an online journal of sorts. I write entries, and people read them, make comments... the people I'm visiting and I have become friends via that...

She continued to drill me... Well what's your common interest? Don't blogs talk about politics?
What kind of entries do you write? Really? You have time for this in your life? And why would they be interested in reading about your life like that? I've never heard of this, explain it again? How did these people find your blog? What would I google to find your blog? And you trust them enough to go to their houses? Etc, etc, etc.

I had to explain about blogging, commenting, and blogrolls, justify once again why I do this, assure her that I HATE writing about politics on my blog, give her to topis of my last three or so posts, tell her what my friends did for jobs ( was sure to mention that they all work or voluneer for CHURCHES), how long I knew them, tell her about my trip to Chicago in March to visit the same friends, exactly what to google to find my site, what it was called, and on and on. It was taking a long time, so a second border guard came into the booth to check in and see if she needed backup. I heard them debriefing as I drove away: "So she's from Canada, and is meeting friends from the inter.... " I'm glad they let me through. She was sooooo skeptical!

Friendly border guard lady, if you're reading this, hello and welcome! Thanks for letting me visit my lovely friends! Feel free to keep reading!

There was still three hours of driving once I got through, which I passed by using my steering wheel for resistance and gave myself a good arm workout as I drove across the state of Michigan. My arms were actually sore the next day! Sweet!

I finally arrived safe and sound at Anne and Andy's, where Jean was also there waiting for me. I knew which house was hers cause I recognized if from photos she'd posted on her blog! So funny! It was like I had been there before.

And so began the Grand Rapids part of my adventure...

Mahwiage is wot bwings us toogevah tooday

I woke up at 6:15am on Thursday, and other than dozing on the plane the whole way to Windsor, I didn't go to bed till about midnight on Friday night. Mental note: sleep is good. Not sleeping is bad. It makes you do all kinds of crazy things. BUT, Red Bull can be your best friend in a pinch. That is all.

Trudy and I arrived in Windsor for Dave and Becca's wedding and were quickly integrated into the pre-wedding insanity (read: fun). The other girls had been there for a few days and had been cooking, organizing, and supporting Becca in all things last-minute related. We were all staying at Becca's parent's house, so in all there were 7 girls who had taken over. We had a blast that night - wine, giggles, foot massages, toasts, fashion shows, and a few other festivities - and getting ready the next day. Hair, makeup, excitement, photos... it was SO fun to be involved in all that, even though I wasn't actually a part of the wedding party. Becca was wonderful at including everyone, even in her formal photos. It was splendiferous, and really was great to be a part of all that fun stuff. That's really what makes wedding so much fun is all the behind-the-scenes stuff.

And the wedding itself, of course, was beautiful. I have TONS of photos (did you really expect anything different?!) which I'll pare down and post when I get home. The wedding was outdoors in a park with a little lake as a backdrop. It was casually elegant - they pulled that seeming oxymoron off wonderfully. The reception was a pot-luck BBQ. Everybody brought a salad or a dessert, and then there were all kinds of skewers grilled on the BBQs. Everyone pitched in, and everyone had a blast. It was a really neat concept for a wedding!

And now Dave and Becca are hitched! Ah-WOO-HOO! I can't wait to see them when they get back from their honeymoon in Turkey! (Lucky!)

After the wedding, Trudy, Jordan, Lloyd (friends from Vancouver) went into downtown Windsor (woohoo!) to party with all the 19 year olds who cross the border from Detroit cause they're still too young to drink in the states. Oh man, they looked like babies! [crying] I'm getting oooolllllldddd!!!

Heh.

We checked out the waterfront then found an Irish Pub with live music and chilled there before going back to Lloyd and Jordan's hosts and having a late night PJ party. We didn't go to bed till about 3:30. Once again with the no sleep. Once again with the Red Bull the next day.

Sunday we blasted back to Toronto and while Lloyd hung out with his old man, Jordan and Trudy and I did some sightseeing. Which consisted of a funky market-style restaurant and the CN Tower. And that was about it. We straggled ourselves down to the waterfront and collapsed on a shady grassy knoll for an ice cream and a wee nap. So pretty much I can say I've seen Toronto now, right?

Ok, so maybe the tower and a small section of boardwalk doesn't quite count. Meh. Whatever. ;)

After meeting up again with Lloyd for dinner with some of his friends from university and chilling back at one of their apartments, we crashed at Lloyd's dad's place and I got up early the next morning to head back south to Grand Rapids...

Holy MACKEREL

I hadn't used that saintly fish expression in a while. I figured it was about time.

I leave in LESS THAN FOUR HOURS for my crazy road trip. Windsor, Ontario for a wedding, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Grand Rapids to see Jean and Anne, Cincinnati to see Sarah, then back to Toronto to see Ann. I! AM! SO! EXCITED! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But! My laundry is still going, I still have dishes to do, and I have not packed one single thing. Except my "nerd bag" of chargers, camera cords, batteries, etc. But other than that? N-o-t-h-i-n-g.

I think. I. am. going. to. die.

OK, so maybe I'm being a wee tad melodramatic. So shoot me. But seriously. This is the craziest day I've had in a looong time.

I got up bright and shiny early for my last day of summer school (there is not enough room on this blog to contain the WOOHOO that that fact deserves). I plowed through the day, said goodbye to the kids (who still have to go back tomorrow, nyah nyah!), and then set to nearly three hours of packing up not one but two, count'em TWO classrooms from the summer school mayhem. And writing a sub plan for tomorrow. And hauling all my boxes from my now-packed up grade 5 classroom from where I thought I could keep them to where I was actually SUPPOSED to keep them. I can't move them to my new room cause I still don't know what the heck I'm teaching next year. And it may be that I'm back to being stuck in the French Immersion grade 2. BAH. I don't even want to go there right now.

After leaving work at 7:15pm, I began the mad dash - to the mall for shoes to go with the dress for the wedding on Saturday. Then to the insurance place for rental car insurance. Don't need it. Yay! Got back to my car. Frickkin lights left on. Battery dead. Friendly hippie man in Pink Floyd Hammer pants (OK, sure. Whatever floats your boat) gave my car a jump. To Future Shop. I'm now the proud owner of a wireless FM transmitter for my MP3 player. Kinda can't have a road trip without tunes, eh? Drove like a maniac (uhm, mom, I mean, I drove safely and calmly 3km under the speed limit the whole way) to a different insurance place for travel insurance. Squeaked in ONE minute before closing. Headed home. Laundry and dishes everywhere. Threatening to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!! No time. Noooo tiiiiime!

I've booked the taxi for 4am. He's gonna call when he's here. Think I can count on that for a wake up call? Heh, no matter. I have a feeling I'll still be up.

Three hours and counting.... guess I really should go pack now, eh?

Hooraaaay for holidays. The prep makes me insane, but oooooh, I can't wait!!!!!