Friends

It's been nice seeing friends (when we can - sadly there are friends in so many places that we can't feasibly fit all their homes into our trip) as we go across the country. We stayed with Cindy and Chris in Cleveland, who were good enough to let us re-freeze our ice packs and refrigerate the cooler contents overnight AND had some sweet A/C after we came from super-hot Chicago.

Dan and Laura let us stay with them in Connecticut and took us to a super awesome brew pub in Willimantic that's housed in a big old post office - nice! I had some super-tasty mussels and a cider. They also brought us to an awesome cop-themed diner for breakfast where they had many police patches from all over:





Willimantic apparently has an amazing boom box parade each year where everyone walks down the street with boom boxes, all tuned into some radio station playing patriotic music. Isn't that awesome? I wish we'd done our road trip near the 4th of July now! :)

Also, more cool Connecticut trivia (Dan and Laura definitely win in this department!) is that they call their liquor stores "package stores". What?! Laura said that it's because they used to sell packages (i.e. cases) of booze rather (or as well as?) bottles, which makes sense.

We won't be stopping to see any friends (at least not planned!) on the trip back, but now I'm thinking it might be cool to drive somewhere down south (maybe down the west coast and up the east coast or something) and see the friends we've got in other places. Definitely worth thinking about.

It's also nice seeing my family after a year (!) - it's amazing that it's been so long, but it certainly gives you plenty to talk about. I wish I could visit more often! I also feel kind of bad that I've forgotten how to get around in what used to be my hometown. I would be making a lot of wrong turns if it weren't for our GPS. I can manage to get around in the area that we're staying at (grocery store, highway, etc.) but last time I was here I got lost trying to get to my grandma's house! Duh... probably because I decided to take the highway, which I never used to do.

Tomorrow my nephew is graduating - that is awesome! It makes me think of high school and college - both places definitely brought me a big group of friends scattered all over the place, and it's cool to see them all and be able to pick up right where we left off even if we haven't seen them for months or years. Hooray for the internet!