Jon drove. Jon hates driving. I make him anyway.
My sister, Lilly, rode with us because she didn't want to hang out with my parents for several days on the wine tour they went on rather than spend time with her friends during that time since her break from school was only two weeks long. She had to sit in the back between the car seats. I'm really mean, I guess. Aleks showed her his Lego catalog.
I need a haircut.
The skies were clear and the temperature mild.
Lilly kept trying to sleep, placing her hoodie over her head to block out the light and make her invisible to the boys. They continuously tried to pull it off.
Aleks drew a bit. He's been on this kick of drawing monsters from Pokemon-like card games. He got it from a show on Cartoon Network dot com called Bakugan. He also played one of these types of games online while we were in Dayton. The language he uses completely reflects it - lots of talk of different monsters and how much more powerful they are than each other due to certain attributes. He wrote a whole book about it for Grandpa Jim's birthday. There was no continuing story, just lots of monsters on each page attacking cities or saving the day or having risen. T-Rexes, Giant Green Monsters with Claws and Blades on their teeth, Giant Spiders, and Mountain Trolls all battling with K-5000 power cannons or having meat picnics. Very entertaining.
Northwest Ohio is full of farms. Barns and row upon row of corn and soybean.
And whatever this is. Row after row after row.
The boys insisted on constantly finding ways to touch Lilly. Aleks would periodically pretend to sleep when I suggested he relax and take a nap and without fail would grab her hand in his as he faked snoring.
He was really super goofy.
Bastian's leg was in the sun for a long time. He doesn't seem to burn at all, though I worried about the heat. Turns out chemical sunscreens are more carcinogenic than sun exposure and my non-chemical ones were in the trunk.
Toledo has this weird giant suspension bridge that doesn't seem to suspend anything. How can it be suspended from the middle?
In Michigan, the world is colored by orange barrels and car factories.
There's a huge construction project going on right near the Bridge to Canada in Detroit. I had to print out all this information about how to get through, though it ended up that the bridge exit is the last one before the construction. I had never seen so many cranes though.
Going into Canada is so much easier than coming back to the States. We were over and in Windsor in less than fifteen minutes.
Canada looks just like Ohio, except with more space between everything. And flatter. There were Orioles all along the fenceline, their orange spots giving them away.
I read the last three chapters of The Iron Giant to everyone in the car to try to get the boys to calm down. Only Bastian and Lilly fell asleep. Jon thought the book was crap and liked the movie better. I didn't realize that the author, Ted Hughes, once the Poet Laureate of England, was the husband of Sylvia Plath. He cheated on her and made her generally miserable, which contributed to her suicide in 1963.
Once in London and in our hotel room, Jon and Lilly immediately break out their laptops and start to work on the very important keeping in touch with the Loser board and Myspace, or whatever it is that they do.
Instead of contending with pee-soaked clothes all weekend from accidents (Bastian only has accidents when we're not at home), I found someone with some leftover Pull-ups to borrow. Bastian put one on his head and played with the room phone.
He was quite proud of himself. He looked a little like a luchador.
We walked to Victoria Park for the festival, where we had Indian food for dinner followed by ice cream. Grandma Cat took the boys back to the hotel where they rented a movie and ate microwave popcorn, their favorite things to do with Grandma.
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