The Great American Road Trip: Day 55 - Deerfield, to South Bend

To South Bend at EveryTrail
EveryTrail - Find the best Hiking in Illinois
Distance - 122 miles
Time -2 hours

The last day with Allie and the kids was very busy and a lot of fun. I woke up intending to go running, but the super warm, fluffy sheets on the guest bed lulled me back into their cocoon of warmth. At least until I got jumped on by a pair of wide awake kids! Allie made gluten-free chocolate and vanilla pancakes using some Halloween pancake molds – we had pumpkins, haunted houses, bats, skeleton bones, and our initials, complete with black and orange sprinkles. They had a little more texture and chew than pancakes with gluten, but I don't think I would have noticed the difference if I hadn't known in advance. Jeff had to go into work, so Allie and I went with the kids to Home Depot to buy some bales of hay and then came home and dragged the Halloween decorations out of the attic. Gale and I made ghosts out of sheets to hang outside on the tree while Scott helped Allie stretch cotton “spider webs” over the bushes.

It was about lunch time but we were finally all organized to leave again so we got in the car and drove over to the animal shelter to visit the “cat house”. The adoption agency is very welcoming of people who just want to come play with the animals, and they have two rooms just dedicated to large herds of cats! Growing up I was totally a dog person, until I got a kitten (and then two!) in Burkina and they totally charmed me into switching my loyalties. It doesn't hurt that right now with my busy schedule and nomadic lifestyle, a self-sufficient cat would be a better fit over a more interaction-intensive dog, but I do hope to have both someday. Allie assured me that there are normally many more cats, easily double or triple the number that we saw, but the 70 or so that were there was plenty for me! The kids and I chose our spots on the floor and quickly were surrounded (and covered) by cats that wanted attention and scratches. I was sorely tempted to adopt a traveling companion but I think that is just going to have to wait a few more months until I have a place to put a litter box (besides the foot well of my passenger seat). There was a very calm kitten named Cookie who let us all take turns holding her all curled up in our arms – the kids were ready to adopt her in a heartbeat! And of course meeting her made me think of Barbra's dog, Cookie, back in Tucson (please give her a hug for me and tell her I miss her?)

We went home and had lunch, then took some goodbye photos outside with the pumpkins and our matching fedora hats ;) I stopped for gas, missed a few turns, but finally got on the highway and on my way to South Bend, Indiana. I didn't realize that Indiana is where the time changes from central to east coast, so I was on the phone with my mom when it dawned on me that turning off the highway onto local roads that went past Notre Dame meant I was only 6 minutes away instead of an hour and 6 minutes away! I feel like this happens every time I cross a time zone, but at least now I know where the line is for next time heading back. I will say that my US geography growing up was clearly very lacking but this trip is really helping me have a better idea of where states are in relation to each other.

I stayed in South Bend with Kimbra, a childhood friend from middle school. She moved to Idaho with her parents after our freshman year of high school and we're both very bad about staying in touch beyond casual facebook contact, but I'm so glad that she saw my posts about this trip and invited me to visit! She's a grad student at Notre Dame, studying Leishmania parasites and using drug resistance to figure out the mechanism of how the drug commonly used to treat cutaneous leishmaniasis works (it's one of those “we found out that it works on this disease by accident and it would be nice to know why it works so that when the disease becomes resistant we can try something else” drugs). We toured the campus (huge and beautiful!) and I found out that her boyfriend Raju has an incredible memory for little details about the history of the campus and the art/archetectural features – it was fun to have my own private sunset tour. We went out to dinner to Fiddler's Hearth, an Irish pub - I had a vegetable boxty, essentially veggies inside of a folded over potato pancake/crepe doused in a delicious lemon pepper cream sauce, and we shared an incredibly boozy white chocolate chip bread pudding that was just decadent.

We headed back to Raju's house and watched the end of The Dark Knight with his housemates and their charming black lab/pit bull, Jaden. He is a tennis ball kind of dog and will happily fetch until the ball is soggy and you've bounced it off of every wall, chair, and person in the room multiple times, and when you leave he has a chair that lets him sit and stare out the front window after you ;)