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 ;)

 Morning blogging and Halloween song youtube videos

 Gale and two of the ghosts

 Cat heaven

 Gale

 A whole room of cat trees

 Me and Scott and the cat chairs looking out the window

 Cookie, the most patient kitten in the world

 She loved being curled up like this

 Playtime!

Dad's "Fuzz" bear has a good home here

 Photo madness

 Driving into Indiana

 Touchdown Jesus

 The basilica

 Hall of Engineer :ing

Jaden

Days 53-54 - Goodbye St. Louis, hello Chicago

To Deerfield at EveryTrail
EveryTrail - Find the best Hiking near St. Louis, Missouri
Distance - 318 miles
Time -  6 hours 15 minutes

I was very reluctant to leave St. Louis - I feel like there's still so much to see! After the kids had breakfast and the adults had coffee, we all went our separate ways for the day. I packed up the car, stopped at MoKaBe's Coffeehouse up the street for a quick breakfast, posted some postcards, and got on the road towards Chicago. The drive was fairly uneventful besides a stretch of construction traffic, and I got to the Chicago suburbs around 3pm despite the unexpected delay.

I haven't seen my cousin Allison and her twin 5 year olds (Gale and Scott) in a few years, and it's been even longer since I've seen her husband Jeff, so it was a treat to finally get to catch up with everyone! Allie and I played with the kids for a little bit and finished prepping one of her amazing apple pies, then took them (the kids, not the pie) to Scott's "ninja" class where he got to run around a bit and Gale made friends with another girl her age who was also waiting for a brother in the class. Scott got his 2 month badge so Jeff took him to choose a toy at the store while the girls stopped by the grocery store and went home to start dinner (and bake the pie!)

The next day we had a couple of options but decided to spend the day relaxing and getting pampered at the Waldorf! Jeff bravely took the kids for their busy day of tennis lessons, Kumon, and Halloween Hoopla at the park while Allie and I went down to Chicago. We started out with coffee at Intelligentsia, a wonderful local chain with lattes that were so rich it was almost like drinking breakfast in a mug! We also tried a morning bun, sort of a pinwheel-type pastry with orange zest brown sugar rolled up between the flaky layers. Knowing that once you're in the spa they let you hang around for pretty much as long as you want, we made manicure reservations and then spent several hours in the relaxation room chatting, reading magazines, drinking vanilla-bean flavored water, and eating the never ending supply of almonds and dried fruit. We ended up with gorgeous nails and feeling pretty sleepy that evening after all that relaxing!

We both had been craving pizza so Allie ordered from a local restaurant while I got the kids in the bath after Jeff left for a family birthday party. Scott is gluten-free, making pizza a little difficult usually, but this restaurant has come up with a pretty creative solution - make the crust out of sausage! It was a little 6 inch kids pizza, with a very thin layer of sausage that they'd turned up at the edges in order to hold the sauce and cheese on top - I'm not sure if they cooked the "crust" before adding the toppings or if the baking process was enough to cook the meat. It was definitely a hit with Scott!

After pizza we had promised the kids a movie night, so they chose "Brave" (we might have tipped them towards the movie we wanted to watch just a little) and we settled in to watch - a fantastic end to a very fun day.

 Goodbye St. Louis arch

 Illinois fields

 Artwork that the kids made for me, including a heart to take to "Uncle Richie"

 We found a butterfly on the sidewalk and moved him out of the way

 I'm starting to think that Gnome might have a coffee problem...

Cool statue across from the coffee place

Day 52 - Around St. Louis

I'm starting to think I should move to St. Louis just because I would have to visit way too many times to see all the things I want to see! Angie and Will live very close to Tower Grove park, so I finally convinced myself to be up and out of bed at a semi-early hour and went running around the park and down Grand Street - it was a lot of fun to realize that I was going past a lot of places I had seen when I visited in May, I had no idea at the time that they were all in the same neighborhood.

By the time I got home and showered, Angie had gone to school and her mom had come over to watch Rollie. She brought her little dachshund mix who happened to look just like a miniature version of Walker - they looked very cute together! We talked for a little while about traveling and things to do around the city, and then I hopped in the car and drove over to the City Museum.

Imagine the coolest playground/maze/secret tunnel-filled house that you ever saw as a kid. Now make that 3 stories tall, full of caves and slides and hiding nooks, fish and trees, hollowed out airplanes and school buses - it was amazing! I was feeling adventurous and managed to get myself wedged into a few improbable places, but admittedly I was wishing I was a foot or two shorter to be able to really sneak my way into all the nooks and crannies. There's no map, no warning signs (besides to keep your hands tucked in when you go down slides) - you just go and explore and stumble on things as you go. Wednesdays and Thursdays in October it's free to go up on the roof (usually an extra charge) and since it was pretty cold out the whole museum was fairly empty and easy to explore. I went down both of the 10-story slides, got lost in the caves, and spent a good deal of time climbing around outside and playing in the ball pit. There's even a free art area where I made a mini-Gnome out of clay and cut out a calla lily snowflake - there were also places to paint, craft, and even make rag dolls/action figures.

Around 2:30 I left the museum and made my way back west a little to Forest Park. I think I could spend a week here alone - it's a huge park filled with free museums. That's right, the art museum, the zoo, the history museum, and the science center are all in one location and they're all free - how neat is that? I met Sunyata there and we proceeded to spend about 5 hours talking - outside looking over the city, inside browsing through the art museum (including the new modern art wing), and then relocated to Cafe Ventana after a quick stop to say hi to the Burkina kitties (!). I'm so glad that we managed to find a time to meet up - it was amazing to see her and start to catch each other up on all of the things going on in our lives, and I'm grateful that she suggested meeting at the art museum because otherwise I don't think I would have seen it on this trip! We skipped the coffee in favor of earl gray, but did indulge in dessert before dinner :) The lemon bar that I tried did have a slight egg-y hint to it but still tasted deliciously sweet-tart, and seemed to have a slightly crisp caramelized surface under the powered sugar as though it had a very thin brulee top from baking. When I got home I had second dessert with Will and Angie since Angie and the kids had made apple crisp using one of those old apple peeler/slicer/corer devices - it smelled too good to resist!

 One of the entrances to Tower Grove Park

 I'm still so impressed by the electric box artwork around town

 Ginger cat in the window of the antique store on Grand

 Happy Halloween!

 At the City Museum - that spiral goes up into a series of plastic tunnels in the ceiling

 Climbing up to the roof and the 10 story slide

 View from the roof to the outdoor area, as taken from the bus that hangs out over the edge

 So many places to climb and explore

 Like a giant game of snakes and ladders, you find places to climb and slide nearly everywhere

 The man at the top of the 10 story slide agreed to take a picture with Gnome

 Kind of randomly, there were turtles and fish in the museum

 Gnome and a sea lion

 Yes I did slide down that, and yes I did almost get stuck in one of the tight turns

 Gnome and Mini-Gnome!

 The paint table

 This was pretty much the extent of the warnings around the museum - it was surprising but refreshing

 The slide had rollers painted in different colors that you could spin with your hands on your way down

 Just climbing around

 Gnome in the ball pit

 The lady who designs all the snowflakes (in animal/instrument/plant shapes of all kinds) also makes patterns that you can cut out yourself - I made a calla lily snowflake

 Outside of the art museum

 "Art Hill" in Forest Park

 This just looks unbelievable in person

 Gnome! What did you do with my lemon bar?

 Sunyata and Gnome

I really want this light sconce in my house one day

Days 50-51 - Springfield, To St. Louis

To St Louis at EveryTrail
EveryTrail - Find the best Hiking in Missouri

Distance - 220 miles
Time - 3 1/2 hours

Tuesday was another beautiful lazy day full of blogging, adding facebook photos, and spending several hours (!) on the phone. I never went through that stereotypical phase of being the young teenage girl hogging the family phone, so I guess I'm just making up for it now? ;) I did get up and out of the house to go explore the Springfield public library, mostly because when I was driving in I had passed a massive sign for "The Library Center". I couldn't actually tell if it was a library or some kind of store named "The Library" but Jerry assured me it was indeed a library, with a good coffee shop to boot. Thus I ended up in the Mudhouse for my morning coffee, checking some email and delighting at the rows and rows of books radiating out from the central atrium that I was staring at out of the window.

I was in a good mood to be near so many books, generally being smiling and chatty as I ordered my coffee and settled into a comfy leather armchair. As I was puttering around on my computer, the man sitting a few tables down packed up and was getting ready to leave and stopped by my chair to hand me a napkin with a little smiley face on it and a note inside wishing me a great day. I know on the one hand being complemented on my looks by a stranger is slightly creepy and objectifying, but I still found it rather sweet and well-intentioned, it made me smile to have my good mood been the cause of someone else deciding that it was going to be a good day for them as well. And, as several people have asked, it did not have his phone number in it!

I took a tour around the library and tested a few armchairs in the reading room, then headed home to talk and walk around the neighborhood a bit. With perfect timing, just as I was finishing my call Juliaette got home from her work trip! We picked up the kids and Jerry, and all headed south to Branson for dinner with some work friends who happened to have a daughter about Jack's age.

On the way I got to ask about the strange overpasses I'd experienced several times now - as you approach, you can go right to enter onto the freeway as you would normally, but instead of going through a traffic light and then waiting at a second to turn left to go the other direction on the freeway, the overpass traffic crosses over itself. So if you're heading north on the right hand side of the street with southbound traffic on your left, now you're out on the bridge over the freeway heading north on the left side of the street with southbound traffic on your right. This enables you to turn left onto the freeway without crossing traffic, and then you are guided back to the normal right side of the street as you get off of the overpass bridge. It's called a "diverging diamond", it's apparently quite the thing in traffic management circles, and although it was navigable as a driver, it was admittedly very odd and confusing the first few times!

On Wednesday I sadly had to say goodbye to Jerry when he went to work, and then to the kids when we dropped them off at pre-school. Juliaette had apparently read my mind and figured out my intention to get Oliver washed before I left town that afternoon, and suggested that we make a morning of it! First we stopped to get lattes at Hebrews Coffee so that we could just sit and relax and talk for a while, one of my favorite things to do with people I stay with. The coffee shop was very nice, I was particularly impressed by the little meeting room you could reserve in the back for larger groups - what a good idea, especially since I've often used coffee shops as a meeting place or study group location, a private area would have been very useful at times. After our coffee we went to get the car washed and vacuumed, then took a detour to the grocery store before getting lunch at Firehouse Subs. Quick and tasty!

Odd thing I noticed about Springfield - there seems to be some kind of price fixing going on with the gas prices. I use GasBuddy, an iPhone app that tells you the price of gas at various stations, listed by their distance from you or by the lowest to highest price (as reported by other users of the app). Most of the time you see a huge spread of prices, very rarely are more than a few at the same price in any given area, they differ by at least a few cents all the way up to maybe 50 or 60 cent spreads. In Springfield it was as though everyone had agreed on two or three set prices, because suddenly I would have 10-15 stations on the list all at the same price, then 10 or 15 more at the same slightly higher price. Gone was the $3.99 to $4.09 of California, or even the $3.39 to $3.69 of Colorado - here the majority of stations were at $2.99, with the next set arriving at $3.04! I have no idea why it was like this, but I did appreciate it all the same.

I helped Juliaette take the groceries home, and was on the road by about 2, arriving in St. Louis around 5:30. Will and Angie are another set of family reunion "cousins", Will's parents and mine are first cousins so that makes us second cousins? The two of them moved to St. Louis from the east coast about 4 years ago to be closer to her family, and they have two beautiful children and a very friendly and huge golden retriever named Walker. I arrived just in time for dinner - perfect timing! Angie was still at work so Will and the kids and I sat down to enjoy some shrimp curry. Will took Rollie, their 1 year old, up to bed while Quilla (age 4) and I painted for another hour or so. Have I mentioned how much I love playing auntie to all of my cousins/friends children? These kids never fail to amaze me with their creativity! The family lives in this fun century old house that has been modernized bit by bit over the years - it's very narrow but three stories tall, so I got to peek out under the eves from the guest bedroom on the third floor, looking out at the street through the treetops. Angie came home as we were reading bedtime stories; the three of us chatted and watched the first game of the World Series while sitting in the living room where I could sneak admiring looks at the blanket and chair fort that had been constructed in the dining room :) A great day with two welcoming families - what could be better?

 Smiley note

 Library bathroom graffiti ;)

 Gracie!

 Jack in the car on the way to Branson - I was always having so much fun when I was with the boys that I totally forgot to take pictures! I only got this one because I was sitting in the back row of the van and Jack was facing me

 Morning lattes

 At the "Historic Route 66" rest stop on I-44

 Trees and fields and greenery

 Our magnificent works of art! Quilla loves rainbows and mixing paint colors together to see what color they turn into, and was much more generous towards the color brown than I was at her age. Also, isn't the idea of using an egg carton brilliant?