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The Great Dyal Vacation of 2004 Trip Journal Entry #1: July 2nd
It's July 2nd, 2004 in Michigan. It's a relatively warm day, a nice day to be heading out of town. I'm already cleared to leave work by 3 this afternoon anyway, and I'm hoping to get even a bit of a jump on the day beyond that; we want to leave town by three, which means I need to leave work around 2. That wasn't likely to be a problem, as there wasn't really much going on and my boss wasn't even around anyway.
But the day started off with problems first thing; my wife, literally as I was walking out the door already late for work, asked me to help her put on the car-top carrier that we had bought from Sears online. This turned out to be much easier said than done. Not only was the cartop carrier a bit too wide for our roof rack, so that it had to sit up on top of the thumb wheels on one side. This also made it incredibly difficult to put on, as well, as the studs that attached to the crossbars were long enough to easily go around the crossbars, but were barely long enough to attach in our situation. Julie and I spent more than an hour trying to get the stupid thing situated, and ended up with our arms slammed in the carrier more than once for our trouble. So, on the day I wanted to leave work at 2, I didn't end up arriving until 9:30 or so...
Like I said, though, it was an extremely slow day, though, and I was able to get done the things I needed to, with a little bit of hustling, to make that schedule. By the time I came home, we were about ready to load the kids in the car and hop in. I took about five minutes to pack myself a backpack of a few books (like about 20) that I might want to read while on the trip. Naturally, I browsed through several of them during the trip, none of them I finished and most of them I didn't even look at. Because the car had been packed very carefully, and this backpack was unaccounted for by Julie, it became the bane of her existence, always in her way.
We made our way without much incident that day. Chicago was very backed up in traffic on I-94, although it improved when when we hit I-55 and turned south for St. Louis. That's one problem with booking your hotels in advance for the trip; we saved probably 50-60% by doing that, but we were also locked into our schedule, which meant that traffic backups ensured we would be arriving very late that night. There was another traffic jam in St. Louis, right on the bridge across the river, in the shadow of the arch (well, there would have been a shadow if it wasn't 11 at night, anyway) there had been an accident which closed us down to one lane.
Once we were in St. Louis proper, we found out why we were able to get our hotel so cheap. I'm sure it routinely had vacancies, because they went out of their way to be off the beaten track and hard to get to. Even once we found it, we drove around it in circles for 15-20 minutes trying to find the entrance.
It's July 2nd, 2004 in Michigan. It's a relatively warm day, a nice day to be heading out of town. I'm already cleared to leave work by 3 this afternoon anyway, and I'm hoping to get even a bit of a jump on the day beyond that; we want to leave town by three, which means I need to leave work around 2. That wasn't likely to be a problem, as there wasn't really much going on and my boss wasn't even around anyway.
But the day started off with problems first thing; my wife, literally as I was walking out the door already late for work, asked me to help her put on the car-top carrier that we had bought from Sears online. This turned out to be much easier said than done. Not only was the cartop carrier a bit too wide for our roof rack, so that it had to sit up on top of the thumb wheels on one side. This also made it incredibly difficult to put on, as well, as the studs that attached to the crossbars were long enough to easily go around the crossbars, but were barely long enough to attach in our situation. Julie and I spent more than an hour trying to get the stupid thing situated, and ended up with our arms slammed in the carrier more than once for our trouble. So, on the day I wanted to leave work at 2, I didn't end up arriving until 9:30 or so...
Like I said, though, it was an extremely slow day, though, and I was able to get done the things I needed to, with a little bit of hustling, to make that schedule. By the time I came home, we were about ready to load the kids in the car and hop in. I took about five minutes to pack myself a backpack of a few books (like about 20) that I might want to read while on the trip. Naturally, I browsed through several of them during the trip, none of them I finished and most of them I didn't even look at. Because the car had been packed very carefully, and this backpack was unaccounted for by Julie, it became the bane of her existence, always in her way.
We made our way without much incident that day. Chicago was very backed up in traffic on I-94, although it improved when when we hit I-55 and turned south for St. Louis. That's one problem with booking your hotels in advance for the trip; we saved probably 50-60% by doing that, but we were also locked into our schedule, which meant that traffic backups ensured we would be arriving very late that night. There was another traffic jam in St. Louis, right on the bridge across the river, in the shadow of the arch (well, there would have been a shadow if it wasn't 11 at night, anyway) there had been an accident which closed us down to one lane.
Once we were in St. Louis proper, we found out why we were able to get our hotel so cheap. I'm sure it routinely had vacancies, because they went out of their way to be off the beaten track and hard to get to. Even once we found it, we drove around it in circles for 15-20 minutes trying to find the entrance.
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