San Antonio

Greetings from San Antonio!

We met Ike's sister and her family for lunch today before heading to San Antonio. We went to this huge Vietnamese mall-thing in Dallas. It had shops and a great food court. The food was great and cheap. It was so nice to finally meet Chi Hong and her family.

It's H-O-T here...It was 105 in Dallas today and we are about 6 hours south so it's hotter here. And I am not talking heat index, we are talking actual temperature! I swear you melt when you walk outside, it's unbearable.

SO.....we are in another hotel tonight. It's way to hot to be in a tent for us and for the dogs. Thank goodness for AAA. The room we have tonight ROCKS...It's huge and has a couch and everything. The dogs are having a ball. :)

Tomorrow we are touring the Alamo and the River Walk and then heading to New Mexico.

I promise to get some pics up soon. I had to bring some work on the trip so I have been doing that at night too. :)

MJ and FF and waves of the micro kind

Sad news about Michael Jackson and Farrah Faucett. So that's 3 people who died since we left on this trip....concidence?.....good God I hope so. :)

Oh and somehow the microwave at home is broken....the BRAND new one. So I so hope that is the 3rd thing....bad things happen in 3 ya know.

Hello Texas!

We made it to Texas and were going to stop in Houston to see Ike's sister, but she is visiting family in Dallas, so we are in Dallas instead. We arrived late, after midnight local time so we ended up getting a hotel room for the night....Yay AAA discount! Plus it's hot as the bejeezus outside, the heat index is 110 and we are still in tornado country so we opted for the hotel room. The dogs are surprisingly well behaved. Shocking, I know.

The drive through KS and OK were nice. Really flat, lots of cows and these crazy bridges they build across the highways to drive cows from one field to the next. Really cool. We stopped for dinner at a place called Punkin's off of Route 35 in southern OK. It was a little mom and pop kind of place...really nice waitress. They advertise the best catfish and BBQ in OK. Not sure about the BBQ, but I got the catfish and it was awesome....Oh, and they have fried green tomatoes and fried pickles....so yummy....but holy everything fried.....YIKES!

Notes about MO....we loved the BBQ from Zarda's. The Plaza downtown was beautiful! And the houses in Mission Hills were amazing....what do those people do for a living? The downtown is nice, small compared to Philly, but VERY clean. And Becky's mom's apple pie is hands down the best we have ever had!

Everyone we run into (or have run into) especially in the mid-west are super friendly. It's not uncommon for Ike and I to split up in a store/rest stop, etc. and me to come back to get him and find him chatting with someone, usually a woman----hmmmm.... :)

We plan to see Ike's sister in the morning and then head to San Antonio and maybe El Paso. We will probably drive all night tomorrow and find a campground early afternoon.

New Van is ready to be packed up...

We made the trip to the KC airport this afternoon and picked up a new van. It's a Toyota Sienna (the old one was a Kia Sedona). Ike swears it's bigger, but we shall see if it fits all our stuff. :)

We plan to head to TX tomorrow am and continue with the trip. The manager from the Hertz will call us early next week with a day when the old van will be fixed and then we will have to make our way back here before finishing the trip.

Days 4, 5 and 6....More of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Tenessee again, and Missouri

Monday am we had grand plans to get up early and be at the Jim Beam Distillery for a tour at 9 am.....however, the comfort and quietness of the cabin changed our plans. We did make it to Jim Beam, but not until later in the morning. It was the best night of sleep ever! We did the tour and tasting and then headed South to Nashville, Tennessee. We stopped at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville off of Route 155 and did a quick walk around. I have to say I was a little disappointed at the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry building itself was not near as impressive as I thought it would be (just a brick building - there were some pretty light fixtures outside) and they built up all these outlet stores/shops on the Opry grounds, so it was a little more commericalized than I would have thought. I walked around a little. Ike stayed in the car with the girls. We took some pictures and checked out the gift shop and headed out.

We headed further South in Tennessee to Lynchburg to tour the Jack Daniel's Distillery. We arivved in Lynchburg about 7 pm local time (central) and found a state park about a half hour outside the town to camp for the night. The camp site was nice and cheap. And we did have a typical redneck family a few campsites down...which was a hoot. You hate to stereotype, but holy crap they lived up to everything stereotype you have ever heard. Tuesday am we went into town and toured the Jack Daniel's Distillery. This tour was way more involved then the one at Jim Beam. The tour guide was great and there was a lot to see and the history of the Jack Daniel's story was interesting. We even got to see the inside of the vats as the wheat, barley, corn and yeast fermented. It was really cool. After the tour we headed into the little historic town and did some shopping and had a bite for lunch at one of the little cafe's.

We left Lynchburg and headed to Memphis to see Elvis. From Lynchburg (which is in Southern TN) the fastest route to Memphis was through the upper parts of Alabama and Mississippi and then back into southwestern TN. So off we went in search of the King.

And that's where it all went wrong.....
About a mile after we re-entered TN, we were pulled over for speeding. In our defense the speed limit is 70, we were doing 75. We saw signs that there was reduced speed ahead, but never saw another speed limit sign. We were nabbed for doing 75 in a 55. Awesome. The cop was nice, but we still got a ticket.

We arrived in Memphis about 7 pm central time - about an hour after they closed the tours of Graceland. :( So we took some pictures of the outside of Graceland, the gates and the Lisa Marie airplane. We went into a souvenir shop and bought a bumpersticker that said, "I've been to Graceland" which has been changed via a sharpie to "I've been outside the gates of Graceland".

Our plan was to drive through the night and head to Kansas City, MO to stay with our friend Becky for a few nights. Which we still did.....even though we had a little fender bender in the parking lot of the Checker's on Elvis Presley Blvd. Damm fast food.

Yes, kids that's right, in a span of about an hour, we got a speeding ticket and had an accident in a rental. Perfect.

Basically we backed into a pole in the parking lot and normally, this kind of bump (going about 5 miles and hour) would have just dented the fender, but since we are the poster children for Murphy's Law, this little bump shattered the back window. There was glass EVERYWHERE....in the parking lot, in the car, in our boxes, in the dirty bag of clothes that was in the back...everywhere. We called Hertz, reported the accident, received a statement from Checker's that nothing on their property was damaged and headed out to the Hertz at the Memphis airport to exchange cars......Of course, nothing is that easy.

The Hertz did not have a car big enough for us, so our only choices were to stay the night in a hotel in Memphis and hope they had something for us in the morning or head to Kansas City as planned. We decided to head to MO since we couldn't secure the contents of the van. So we drove to MO, 9 hours in a van with the back window shattered and a tarp covering our stuff with a HORRIBLE dinging noise because the sensor on the back door registered it as not shut correctly since the window was missing. It was a LONG drive, but we arrived safetly, in Kansas City at 4 am Wednesday morning.

We slept for a few hours and started making all the necessary phone calls to get a new van and report the accident for insurance purposes. Of course there is a convention occuring in Kansas City this week and there are NO vans to be found within a two hour radius of the city. So 4 hours later we were no better off than when we started. Ike finally was able to get a hold of someone who could help us and thanks to a wonderful Claims Manager at Hertz named Matt we are picking up a new van today (Thursday) at 2 at the Kansas City airport. We will have to detour back to Kansas City after the original van is fixed so we can pick it up and continue our trip.....see, we needed the extra space and took out the second row seats for more room. Those seats are in our garage in Sanatoga, the wrecked car is in MO. It would have been fine had they provided us with the Honda as we requested since those seats fold into the floor....but that is now a moot point.

So we are safe and sound at our friend Becky's house (thank God for her) and have just kind of relaxed the past few days in air conditioned comfort. She has a fenced in back yard and the dogs are in heaven. We joked that we may just stay here for the next 3 weeks, but our desire to see the rest of the country overrides our need for air conditioned comfort.

We plan to pick up the new van this afternoon, repack it and head out tomorrow (Friday) am and drive through to Texas. Hopefully, it all works out.

What happened happened and we can't change it. So please don't ask us who was driving when the ticket was issued or who was driving when the accident occured. We swore ourselves to secrecy and it doesn't matter anyhow since the four of us are safe and unharmed. Life is always an adventure. :)

Day 3....I hate Kentucky

Okay, maybe hate is too strong a word, since I am sitting at our campsite here southern KY about an hour or so from the Tennessee border and am able to blog as they have free wifi, plus the little old guy at the office was so sweet with his Southern twang and laid back manner, he even delivered ice to our site (I asked Ike if we could take him home with us, but he said we already have a little old lady).....but I digress...about the hating part...

.....So last night we ended up getting fried chicken for dinner at a local grocery store and wanted to pick up some beer to go with our chicken. We searched the store for beer and found none, so we asked at the register and the annoyed teenager at the check out told us we were in a dry county and had to drive 30 mins to find a store that sells alcohol. Great - no wonder the checker was cranky - dry county - yikes. We decided that it was worth the drive and made the 30 min trek to Shelbyville which incidently was exactly where we were earlier in the day. It's kinda hard to explain, but the drive to civilization from where we were camping, was long and windy and not at all a direct path. And we kept ending up on the same road that we turned off of about 5 mins from our camp site - I knew it had to be the same road (how can you have two different roads with the same route number within 5 mins from each other). We stopped a few times to ask and even got map quest directions and it kept taking us the long route. I asked at one of the places if it was the same road and the woman behind the counter, I swear to God said to me, "oh, honey, I don't know numbers"....Really? Helpful. We drove back from getting beer (which had a true window drive thru where you place your order, pay and they get your selections) the long windy way and how we didn't see this before is a mystery, but there was a huge sign on the side of a run down shack "Not for Sale". Ike and I started cracking up! Is this a problem for them? Do people actually stop and ask to buy the run-down shack?I almost couldn't help myself and so wanted to stop and ask how much, but Ike said it wasn't such a good idea.

We slept like ROCKS last night - no sleep for a day or so and some Sam Adams will do that to you - and I told Ike before we went to bed that we should put the rain fly on the tent because there were no stars out and I could see lightening in the distance. Good thing too because sometime duing the night we got one heck of a storm. All was well in the AM, I got up bright and shiny and made Ike a father's day breakfast of french toast and scrambled eggs. During breakfast we could hear thunder in the distance so we decided to pack up and leave right away, which was a good idea but we weren't fast enough....right after we took the rain fly off the tent the clouds opened up and it POURED....it was so bad, everything was wet, us, the dogs, the tent (inside and out - see removal of rain fly above), everything INSIDE the tent, blowup mattress, blankets, all our kitchen stuff...it was AWESOME. Mid-way thru the scramble of trying to throw everything we have into the van we looked at each other and just started cracking up....it was hysterical, we were racing toward nothing - everything was already soaked. And poor Marley, she is such a baby and HATES being wet, so she whined the entire time...all she had to do was go under the table. We finally got everything in the van and headed to the camp bathrooms to at least change into some dry clothes, by the time we made it to the bathrooms - about 100 yards away, it stopped raining. I thought Ike's head was going to pop off his body, he was so mad. We decided to get the tent back out to try and get some of the water out, but as soon as we did, the rain started again. It was comical.

After drying off and repacking the van, we headed out to Louisville to go to Church Hill Downs. Apparantly the state budget for sinage in KY is minimal, it took us hours to find it with a GPS and maps and stopping to ask for directions from a very nice, albeit bright-red headed lady at an air-conditionless McDonalds and an old balding guy with 70s style glasses and an attitude like he was God's gift to women at a gas station. We ended up in a not so nice section of Louisville and I kept telling Ike to stop and ask for directions, he would have none of it. I guess we were in the slums, but it didn't look so bad. We FINALLY found it and when we did, I could not believe people could not give us decent directions to get there. It was HUGE, and I mean HUGE, like 5 city blocks and the buildings were all white and gold - how do you live in Louisville and not know where Church Hill Downs is? We decided to forego the tour and just took some pictures. There is a big statue of Barbaro out front. Kinda sad. But all in all worth the effort, I think.

From Church Hill Downs, we raced to get to Jim Beam and got there just as they closed. Par for the course today. But we were allowed to walk around and take pictures. It was a big operation. Much bigger than I had anticipated and pretty interesting looking. We are going to try to get back tomorrow.

We left Jim Beam and headed to Nashville about 3 hours away, but since everything we owned was still wet and shoved in the back of the van, we decided to stop at a campsite along I64 and then our day started to turn around - the campsite was perfect! Clean, cheap, well maintained, free wifi, friendly people and an air conditioned cabin to boot. We were allowed to take over the site next to us and get everything out to let it all dry. Thank goodness! Of course there was a White Castle at this exit too, which totally made Ike's day.

So tonight we sleep in the comfort of an air conditioned cabin and dry clothes and my disdain for KY is diminishing as I type. :)

PS - We finally did go down that other road and it was the SAME one that was 5 mins from our campsite - I guess directions are not KY's strong point.

Happy Father's Day to all you Dads!

Oh, and my friend Alicia had her baby today - she was really early and the baby is only 4lbs, but mom and baby girl are doing well. Thanks for the text, Lauren!

Batters up

Steph got to stay in the air conditioned van with the girls while I toured the Louisville Slugger Museum, since I am such a big baseball fan (I'm not really). I ended up walking through the streets of Louisville, with a complimentary mini-bat in one hand and a full sized bat in the other to find Steph blogging at an expired meter.
Pictures will follow...

And we are off.....

Packing up the van and getting the house ready for being gone a month was nothing less than interesting. We spent hours packing and re-packing the van countless times only to realize we had more stuff to pack and then remembering yet more things we needed, topped off with cleaning up the house before we left, I thought we would never leave. But sure enough around 9:30 Friday night we said goodbye to our house to embark on our journey. Unfortunatly, it was a quick trip because we needed ice among a few other things, so after we picked up a few groceries, we came home to drop some stuff off and re-pack the cooler. We left again about 10, but decided we were hungry since we had not eaten dinner. So off to Wawa we go. THEN, we get back on the road and Ike realizes he forgot his baseball hat. Since we had only made it to the Wawa in Pottstown, we came back to the house AGAIN. Thanfully, the 3rd time was charm and we left for good around 10:45.

We drove out to Harrisburg, down thru Maryland and into West Virgina. We were in WV when the sun came up and seeing the clouds/fog "hang" on the trees in the mountains onto the highway was amazing. I had never seen that many pockets of fog/clouds so close to the ground before. Ike, being from Pittsburgh, was not impressed. I thought it awesome each time we passed through a huge patch of fog. Ike found my enthusiasm amusing for about the first 20 mins.

We made Kentucky by 7:30 Saturday am and decided to detour Lexington in favor of Louisville. We stopped for gas at a random gas station /strip mall off of I-70 and was able to pick up a wireless signal. We researched camp grounds, found a few promising ones and set out to find our home for the night. Let me just say that Kentucky is an uniqueness kind of place (that's for you Len). But seriously, the people are friendly, actually very friendly, but there are some scary back woods areas in this state that would scare the pants off you. Suffice it to say that we went to a few campgrounds and decided on a KY State Park off of Rt. 248. Huge site with enough shade and reasonably priced.

Random thoughts on KY:
Men here don't wear shirts. I don't know why. Young, old, skinny, not so skinny - doesn't matter, shirts are just a nuisance to them.

Oh, and we ran into a biker group when we were driving to Louisville. Yes, let's call them a group. There were a lot of them - A LOT. We have pix. We'll post soon. I had never seen that many bikes all together at once. It was really cool. Oh, and just a side note, they don't like it when you stare.

10 Days and Counting

Packing starts this week. Right now we have a big pile in the back room of the basement ready for Ike to organize so we can pack it into the van. Tetris skills will come in handy. Ike is picking up the van on the 17th.

Hopefully, I can get done my work for this project I am working on and we can leave early on the 19th. Here's hoping!

By the way, we decided that Indiana is a drive-by kinda state. What do people who live there do there in their free-time - it's the most uneventful state ever? And this from someone whose been to Delaware.

Almost time...

I can't believe it's almost here. We talked about it for so long and we are actually going to do it! 29 Days Coast to Coast - in a mini-van - with two German Shepherd's - it's going to be a blast. :)