The Pit Stop

Driving from the Jersey Shore to Minnesota isn't a lot of fun, especially when you're traveling with a five month old and a dog with a bladder the size of a gumdrop. On the other hand, it is quite an adventure and we covered seven states in 21 hours of driving. The first day, after we said our bittersweet goodbyes at Central UMC, we hit the road with the goal of trying to reach Ohio before we needed to call it a night. Greta was pretty good until the last part of PA and Jers proved to be a good traveling companion after he realized we weren't going to the vet (although it took him about four hours to figure that out). We stayed that night in a town named Streetsboro or something like that, about a half hour from Cleveland. Greta was a peach and slept pretty soundly.

On the second day, Monday, we were bound for Chicago and planning to stay with Greg, my good friend from seminary. We got to Chicago in the early afternoon (a pleasant surprise) and met Abby, E's good friend from seminary) for lunch in Skokie, where Abby used to live. After lunch the four of us headed to Greg's house in the northern 'burbs to spend an afternoon lounging in the shade and recuperating from the past few days (months) of craziness. Unfortunately, in Greg's neighborhood, as in much of Chicagoland, the cicadas were hatching. If you've never witnessed a cicada hatching, well, you haven't . . . um . . . witnessed a cicada hatching. Cicadas are pretty big bugs, like about the size of an AA battery. Once every seventeen years they emerge from the ground, hatch and mate and then die or go back underground. I'm glad Methodists don't believe in reincarnation.

Anyway, the cicadas were out in FULL FORCE and when I say full force, I mean these things were everywhere, flying into you, landing in your hair, crawling on Greta. It was pretty nasty. In fact, the sound of the buzzing is so loud that when you go inside your ears ring. Now I'm sure many of you are wondering why we didn't just go in Greg's house, and that would be a good question. But Greg has a healthy sized cat, who not only didn't make fast friends with Jersey, but he caused my eyes to water, my throat to swell up and my nasal passages to clog. And so we sat outside amongst the cicada orgy. The next morning we went over to Garrett, our seminary, to visit with some friends. From there we departed on our third and final leg of our trip to MN.

The pics above are from our time in Chicago.