Monday, May 17, 2010

Day 3 (05/17/2010):

Flint, MI à Portage, WI


 

Driving, driving, and more driving. I have discovered the joy of crossword puzzles on the more boring stretches of road. Our journey was pretty much stop-free except for a turn around after dad's poor navigation (when I was being the navigator! It's like he doesn't trust me with a map!), lunch in a town called St. Joseph on Lake Michigan (yummy greek food), coffee/tea break in Madison, stop just outside of Madison to check out the Gander Mountain there (REALLY cool store, kind of like REI, but with more hunting stuff), and dinner/hotel in Portage. From our hotel window you can see cows, which is kind of awesome. I would say I got to see Chicago, except I didn't. The drivers opted to driver farther from the city to avoid traffic – so sad. The driving hasn't become particularly horrid yet, but there is still time for all the time together to get annoying. After dinner we had a funny sighting: 8+ dogs in a truck cab – makes my carried sounds downright wonderful! Tomorrow we continue our journey to the Badlands/ Mount Rushmore and then to Yellowstone. Hopefully there won't be TOO much snow because the warm weather jackets are somewhat buried.


 

Summary of the day – Wisconsin is beautiful, crosswords are good fun, Cows are awesome, there is such a thing as too many dogs in a car.

Post-Graduation Road Trip

Road Trip

Day 1 (05/15/10):

Boston, MA à Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada


The day started early for me so that I could go and have breakfast with mum and dad at the hotel – My last ride on the T, I think I'm actually going to miss it. L Just as a note, the Hilton Financial District in Boston has a fabulous breakfast offering. Probably expensive though. We went to the waterfront to rent the car, and while dad took care of the paperwork, mum and I wandered around. Did anyone know that there's a Waterfront walk by the harbor? Anyway. We had the car to my apartment and packed by 10:30 (dad's original goal was to be out by 12, so we did really well) and we were on our way. We passed over the state line into New York around lunch time and had lunch at a Cracker Barrel near Albany. The special part about Cracker Barrel for us is that we don't have any in CA, so it's a really nice treat. We then drove towards Buffalo and across the border into Canada (Niagara) and got to the hotel kinda late and walked down the street looking for somewhere to eat. The 'city' around Niagara was a lot like Las Vegas, pretty campy with lots of cheesy attractions, though we found a fairly nice Italian restaurant to eat at. Back to the hotel there were a lot of young Canadians making lots of noise and obviously planning on drinking a lot. They had accents that reminded me of Kirsten's jokes and made me realize that they were based in fact!!!

Summary of the day - Breakfast in Boston, Lunch in New York, Dinner in Canada.

Bed now – more later.




Day 2 (05/16/10):

Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada à Flint, MI


Absolutely gorgeous day! I couldn't tell you what the temperature was, everything was in metric which I fail at converting to Imperial. It was something like 10*C in the morning and reached a high of 18*C. You do the math! We walked to the falls from the hotel and they are AMAZING. The Canadians have created this gorgeous park that goes along the river with flowers, trees, grass, attractive garden 'sculptures' and benches, etc. There should be some pictures somewhere and I'll try to upload them when I get home. We decided to go on the 'Journey behind the Falls' which wasn't quite what I expected, so I was a little disappointed by that. It made me wish we had opted to go on the maid of the mists instead. We walked around to try and get several different views of the falls from different areas in the city before heading to the car and starting our journey in search of Ice wine, which is SO tasty and quite expensive. Our next stop was the town of Niagara by the Lake for lunch and a brief wander. Looking out at the lake I realized how much like an ocean it looks from the shore. I now have a new understanding of the title "the great lakes." After our sojourn in Niagara by the Lake we headed to the border into Michigan, with a stop at a Canadian McDonalds for coffee (dad), an Aero Mint McFlurry (me), and tea (mum). That McFlurry was so tasty, by the way. Sadly, we did not pick up any Smarties or get the Smarties McFlurry. Oh Well. We were hoping to get to Lansing tonight, but after our slightly late start, we only got as far as Flint, MI. Joe Turbessi's reaction to our staying in Flint was something like –'why?'

Summary of the day - Niagara Falls is awesome.