summer trip: day three

Miles so far: 776

The first day of the trip, while we did a lot of travelling on the road, still felt like a vacation. The last two days have not. There have been good moments, so this isn't all bad. I will try not to make this come across too negative, but I am not going to lie, either.

Wednesday did not start off well because NJ woke up at 5:20 and did not go back to bed. As everyone who reads this blog should have figured out, this ruined Golden's day more than mine. We left Bloomington on schedule and met my cousin south of Chicago. She had a baby three to four months ago and she lives a half mile from one of the roads on our planned itinerary, so it would have been wrong for us not to meet somewhere and take pictures of each other's baby. NJ is just short of twenty pounds at a year and MJ (his cousin) is seventeen pounds at less than four months. Golden and I did not help NJ out too much in the size department.Golden's grandparents and her aunt and uncle live a little south of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her grandmother somehow got the idea that we would be in town Wednesday evening rather than Thursday evening, so we were under considerable pressure to get to Michigan as quickly as possible.

The good part was that we all enjoyed playing games at Golden's aunt and uncle's house on Thursday night. The bad part was that NJ had been battling a fever all day and got real hot (about 102 degrees). We had to rush him to the hotel and try to cool him down.

It doesn't sound like much, but Golden and I agreed that Thursday kicked our butts.

Today we visited one of Golden's friends from college and her two kids (pictured below) over lunch. Her husband is in Iraq right now with the Army, so I think she is interested in anything to get out of the house. It was a nice break for us as well.We went back to see Golden's family after that visit and eventually ended up at her grandparents' apartment. We spent most of the afternoon there before going out for supper. As we were driving back to the apartment, Golden noted that NJ's diaper was leaking. Bad. Really bad.

We had to throw away the clothes that NJ was wearing, and six adults spent about a half hour getting the car, the car seat, and NJ bearable (still not actually clean). The one really funny element to the story was that, while everyone else was heavily involved with cleaning up NJ's mess, Golden's grandfather was preparing his fishing rod as if he had no clue what everyone else was doing. He was so focused on wanting to go fishing, he wasn't phased by anything else that was happening. After the quick cleaning job, we came back to the hotel to clean NJ and the car seat better.

So, the current situation is that NJ is still feverish and our vehicle now smells like the inside of a heavily-utilized cattle car. I am hoping that in short order we can upgrade the situation to mildly warm and a cattle car that has not been used for a while.