Chapter 6: Brunswick, Alleghenies

Last Saturday

After the tasty fancy bread breakfast with Ian and Mel, I got going again and decided to drive around Brunswick on my way to New York. Turns out there are some really nifty buildings!

That being done, I got through Cleveland and back onto I-90 toward Erie. 

As I drove through the corner of Pennsylvania, the sky went from overcast:

. . . to slightly foreboding: 

 . . . to fantastically dark and ominous:

And then the skies opened up. 

It was fantastic. Not downpour-y enough to be hard to drive through, just enough that the mountains and trees got blurrier the farther away they were, and the fog was sending tendrils through the valleys between. 

It was fun getting lost in that weather, although "lost" isn't really the right word since it was just a straight shot down I-90 to I-86. It occurred to me that something about that landscape was very familiar, and reminded me of driving the California coast in late fall. Which was weird, because you'd think that there shouldn't be much similar about the Redwood Forests and the Alleghenies. 

Oh and then there was a casino right in the middle of nowhere. So that was cool.

It surprised me, so I didn't get a good picture, but it was this HUGE building, very block-shaped, which seemed incredibly wrong for the landscape, given the mist-ical (haha) atmosphere. 

Eventually the clouds started to clear up.

And from there it was clear skies to Ithaca! 

Which I will post about in a few hours. I'm leaving Augusta, ME for Lincoln, ME, which is only a two-hour drive (IMAGINE THAT) so by late afternoon I should be settled! 

And just a quick reminder, sometime today or tomorrow this blog will be moving to a new URL. Same blog, still me, just a different thing to plug into your bookmarks bar  :)

From Augusta, ME . . . 

Julia

Chapter 5: Lansing, Fort Wayne, Brunswick

Last Friday

I was hoping to leave Lansing around 11, but then I actually slept instead. Oops.

So by the time I made it to Fort Wayne, it was nearly time for Adrius to go to work. Sad Julia  :(  

But Kam was there! And that made it all okay :)

She drove me to this awesome little place in Fort Wayne that has super cheap super tasty foods (you pick out a rice, a bean, and a meat, and they put it on a plate for you and charge like $5) so I had nommy chicken and fall-off-the-bone pork with yellow rice and beans. Then she showed me around town – Fort Wayne has some really lovely parks! Also bridges. Many many bridges. 

After lunch I sadly had to get going, but it was great hanging out with Kam and Adrius (for the 15 minutes he was there) since I only see them about once or twice a year otherwise.

They live in a really pretty part of the country, where every other field is soybeans and corn, and it was gorgeous out so I took some pictures. 

I made it to Cleveland around 7, just in time to have dinner with Ian and Mel. They took me to this place, which I swear lowered my life expectancy by a year (just from the sheer deep-fried air, not to mention the food). It was amazing. 

Then we walked around Mel's place and went to a couple of bars, and then we took ourselves back to her apartment where Ian and I jammed for a bit. I crashed on Mel's futon (super comfy) and in the morning Ian went and got "fancy bread" for breakfast. It was basically focaccia with chunks of mozzarella, tomatoes, and noms all over it. 

And that was Friday!

About to leave Burlington, VT . . . 

Julia

Chapter 4: Petoskey, Sault Ste. Marie, Lansing

*time travel noises*

Last Wednesday:

The 4th of September was spent in the company of Stellaria and her wonderful kids. The younger ones all had school, so she took me out on a walkabout in Petoskey. We visited some friends at the local coin shop, window-shopped at a yarn store and a bookstore, and then Stellaria showed me Petoskey's Local Semi-Historic Landmark Place of Interest.

It's a hole in the ground!

The story behind this (frankly enormous) pit is that some company had plans to build a large complex with entertainment, housing/hotel type stuff, and cool things like that. Broke ground, started digging out the foundation . . . and then the dude in charge absconded with the funds. So it's just sort of sitting there now. Cool, eh? 

("Absconded" is a great word.)

Other neat places in Petoskey: 

The clock tower near the water:

And of course the water itself:

Looking east

Looking west

Happy Stellaria!

Not-happy crab.

Boats!

After our stroll down the pier, we went to a fantastic local Polish place for food. I got pierogi and a pasty, with kielbasa and taters in it! NOMS.

They had a cool map in the restaurant of all the shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.

Stellaria's house is right by the public library, which was really pretty AND had a labyrinth outside!

And that was Petoskey last Wednesday. Good food, good friends, good day.

*MORE UPDATES WILL HAPPEN TOMORROW I PROMISE. The hotel I'm in tonight just doesn't have fast enough internet for me to upload my pictures (it took nearly an hour just to get the ones from Petoskey on here!) so I'm going to find a Starbucks tomorrow morning to do that.

From Burlington, VT . . . 

Julia

(Also I've covered over 2000 miles and 8 states* in 8 days, of which two were non-driving days. WOW)

*(Okay really only 7, I'm not counting Pennsylvania yet.)

Placeholder Post 2: Placehold Harder

I didn't have any inclination to actually do work last night when I got into Cleveland, so I'll do the real post of the last couple days' travels when I get in to Ithaca tonight. And by tonight I mean I'll do it tomorrow morning. And by tomorrow morning I mean sometime tomorrow.

DID YOU KNOW THAT YESTERDAY:

 - Left Lansing around 11:30
 - Made it to Fort Wayne in time to see Adrius before he left for work
 - Had a fantastic lunch and hangout with Kam, who was nice enough to drive me around town and point out cool things (I love seeing friends more often than the usual once a year)
 - Got back on the road around 3
 - Made it to Cleveland in time for dinner with Ian and Mel
 - OMG DINNER WAS SO GOOD
 - LIKE SERIOUSLY
 - Hung out, had a really nice walk around Mel's neighborhood (which seems to be 80% bars)
 - Visited a couple of said bars
 - Played music with Ian /geeked out about music for a while
 - Mel was very tolerant of our hijinks and shenanigans
 - Eventually went to sleep
 - Got up
 - Showered
 - Had tasty foods Ian got at a nearby food-type place
 - Got back on the road
 - Found a Starbucks to post this from
 - Aiming for a long-ish drive to Ithaca

NOW YOU KNOW

(And tomorrow you will know more.)

From A Starbucks . . .
Julia

Placeholder Post

I'll delete this bit tomorrow when I make the actual Petoskey-Sault Ste. Marie-Lansing post, but for now:

 - Made it out of Petoskey by 11:30
 - lovely drive over the Mackinac Bridge
 - 3 separate arguments with myself over pronunciation of "Mackinac"
 - Awesome lunch at a restaurant roughly a block south of Canada
 - back on the road by 2:30
 - Basically straight south to Lansing
 - Checked into the Ramada
 - Talked web design with Chelsea for a while
 - Am now going to sleep because DRIVING IS HARD YOU GUYS

I'll make a real post in the morning.

G'night from Lansing . . .
Julia

Chapter 3: Milwaukee, Michigan Coastline, Petoskey

Look at this, two posts today. Woohoo!

Where was I . . .

Oh yes, Milwaukee.

My original plan from Milwaukee was to take the ferry across Lake Michigan from Milwaukee, WI to Muskegon, MI. I figured, it's a two-and-a-half-hour trip, that should give me time to work on this blog and also maybe read or something.

I failed to take into account, though, the fact that Normal People take the ferry to commute, every day. So when I went into the ticket office at 8:45 (four hours before the ferry) thinking naïvely, "Oh yes, this will be lovely!" the lady very nicely informed me that there was no more room for vehicles on that ferry, and there was no other ferry that day.

Which meant that I had to drive back through Chicago, around the bottom end of the lake, and back up the whole dang Michigan coast.

Fine, I thought. I'll drive through Chicago again.

Urgh.

But this time, I got some nice pictures of the skyline!

 . . . Or, as nice as they can be considering I was taking them while driving SHUSH MOM I'M FINE I WON'T DO IT AGAIN GOSH

Then I just sort of drove for a few hours.

Here's some pictures and videos of Indiana! The sky was really beautiful.

Eventually, Indiana gave way to Michigan, and the trees got even prettier. 

I spent the next several hours driving up the coast of Lake Michigan on I-31, during which time three exciting things happened. One was the afore-posted AC/DC incident, which was seriously really really cool. 

The second exciting thing wasn't really all that exciting, but I thought it was cool. Specifically, it was driving past this sign:

Dear citizens of Covert: a large road sign isn't.

After I passed it, I started thinking of a bunch of stories of the spies that work in Covert, and how they're all really bad at actually being spies. 

And then the third exciting thing was much further up the coast, after passing lovely trees:

 . . . and lovely highway.

When suddenly, on the left of the road, I saw that one of the trees had started to grow something other than leaves. I found someplace to turn around and come back, and I took pictures.

So . . . yeah. Shoe tree. 

At lunch today, I asked Stellaria about it, and she says it's been that way as long as she can remember. In fact, the tree used to be bigger, and have branches that went over the highway, also covered in shoes. Someone would come by every once in a while to clear away the shoes, but people (mostly kids, I think) would pretty swiftly put 'em back. Weird and cool, right? I really wish they'd have a Supernatural episode centered around this tree. It creeped me out, and I was really glad it was full daylight when I saw it. 

And that was the drive up to Petoskey! I was in the car for about 8 hours straight, which was pretty rough. But on the other hand, today was a nice day of hanging out with wonderful people, so it was a good tradeoff!

On that note, I'll write more tomorrow about how I spent the day in Petoskey. For now, I have been commandeered by Stellaria's two youngest sons to play video games. 

From Petoskey, MI . . . 

Julia

Chapter 2: Chicago, Milwaukee

Okay, let's see if I can't get back on a linear timeline . . .

Having spent a lovely Sunday night hanging out with Luna and Wolfgang and a digital representation of Gabriel Iglesias, and having had a lovely Monday morning eating french toast and talking about life with Luna, I got back on the road toward Chicago.

Anyone who didn't grow up in the Chicago area (like me), can we just have a moment of solidarity for the people who have to make that commute every day?

Okay now let's have a longer moment of solidarity for the people who have to make that commute once in a while, who aren't from the area, and don't drive like maniacs out of force of habit. Because that was me on Monday. (And again Tuesday, but that wasn't really supposed to happen.)

I really like Chicago, though, every aspect but the car traffic. The buildings are gorgeous and awesome, and Millennium Park is super super cool.

There was really only one reason I stopped by Chicago on Monday, instead of doing the straight diagonal from Rockford to Milwaukee, and that was the Chicago Cultural Center. If you are ever in that part of Chicago, go into that building.

It's probably one of the most ornate and beautiful buildings I've ever been in, and that was only for 10 minutes this one time when Aaron and I were wandering around Millennium Park before a Great Big Sea concert. Just from a few minutes of looking around in wonderment and realizing that every inch of this place is beautiful I knew I wanted to come back and actually spend some time in there with a camera.

I didn't quite plan to be there on Labor Day, when (as all city/government buildings) the Cultural Center would be closed, but there you go.

Here's a picture of the arch over the front door, which was all I could get to.

(That pigeon, incidentally, was completely awesome.)

"Screw you guys I'm a pigeon." - that pigeon

Also, speaking of beautiful government buildings, have some pictures of the side of the Chicago Public Library.

Yes, that's the side. I didn't even go around the front, but I assume it's more of the same: awesome ironwork owls holding books over your head like avenging angels.

And speaking of Millennium Park . . .

I wandered around the park for a while, enjoying the oppressive humidity and nice enough temperature. There were some really neat street performers around – two women played Bach violin doubles twenty feet from a man playing the Meditation from Thaïs, while across the street a group of young men sat on cartons and played bucket-drums like fireworks.

They were really good, it was like listening to a professional drum corps except there were only five of them making all the sound. They got asked to move be some passing police officers because they were good enough that their audience was huge and blocking the sidewalk. (Which sucked because they were super cool performers, but I thought it was fair because they weren't in the park, they were on the sidewalk across from it, in front of businesses and such.)

Elsewhere in the park, one of the largest single-plume fountains I've ever seen was doing its thing, spreading a message of hope and joy and BY THE WAY YOU'RE WET NOW to passers-by.

It was huge.

Oh and I forgot to mention I had my cello with me on this walkabout, so after getting a "real Chicago dog" from a vendor (as soon as I can figure how to get pictures off my phone, you can see it!) I went and found a place to sit down and play music for a bit!

I played my way through most of Bach's first solo suite (G major), realized I didn't have it memorized nearly as well as I thought I did, and switched to Julie-O and celtic music.

And I made $2.01 in 15 minutes*. PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN WHAT

*Which I promptly spent on the next two street performers I came across. Oh well.

There was also a lot of really neat sculptures in Millennium Park. Some neat statue-type things:

Lincoln gazing out onto the lettuce garden

 . . . and some neat installation pieces . . .

The staring contest of the century

and also a really pretty whatever-this-is in the median of one of the streets (Van Buren? Maybe?):

Lots of beautiful things. I think I'd like to go back to that park again sometime and explore some more; I'm sure there's more art and more music than the small bit I saw.

And that was Chicago! Had a neat conversation with a guy who's also traveling across the country, only he's hitching rides on freight trains instead of driving. And I also found out as I was leaving that although the Millennium Park Garage is super convenient if you're going to be there for a while, it's also godsdamned expensive ($25 flat rate) so I didn't really get my money's worth out of it . . . oh well. 

It's just over an hour drive to Milwaukee out of Chicago, so I made it there with plenty of energy. Went over to my friend Phil's apartment, got him, went to Denny's for dinner, and went and hung out with Chelsea for a while. 

Now's probably a good time to reiterate: This blog will be moving locations sometime in the next few days! Chelsea's awesome and is going to be helping me with the move, and I'll make sure everyone gets told when it happens. 

Okay, so that was Monday! Later today I'll post about the Milwaukee-Petoskey leg of The Journey. If you want to get a feel for that drive, though, check out the mini-post from last night.

From Petoskey, MI . . . 

Julia