Day #13 - Thursday, October 1st, 2009

For some reason Zoe woke much earlier than usual & when John took her outside he found frost on the van and dense fog in the air! Back in the room the three of us all went back to sleep for a couple of hours. In due course we rose, breakfasted & packed the van. WE took note that their really is a difference between less expensive mid-tier motels & the next tier up (which we had otherwise used in a variety of ways). This was fine for a "stop, crash, & go" situation but we wouldn't have wanted to spend several days there, as we had done other places.

We took off, carefully, into the fog that in daylight seemed less dense, were on the Interstate within 45 seconds, and drove through densely foggy valleys between sunny hilltops, switching several times until the sun won. We sailed down the road listening to our audiobooks, stopped & switched at a McDonald's (iced mochas and cookies!), and shortly thereafter entered the only 55 MPH limit section of the day. John remembered the apples & cider place that was usually too crowded to be attempted, but on a Thursday morning was not too bad at all. We stopped, parked, and cruised through the gift shop & cider press building, the apples, breads and etc. building, taking turns to stay outside with Zoe. John bought a pretty wreath, and we each bought cider, apples, bread & cheese curds. En route back to the van Marissa (only) went into the winery building for some time (it was busy, she claimed, only a few samples were tested). It was a fun stop.

Thereafter it was grind, and the rule of three, actually four! First off, for the only time this trip John forgot to return the gas cap, so with Portia going crazy as we ignored her instructions we stopped on the side of the road for him to fix it, before making a U-turn back to the "Motorway" as Portia calls it. Next we hit Indianapolis right at rush hour, when all we wanted was to be home as soon as possible, that was followed by the world's slowest service as we picked up some fast (slow?) food for dinner, and finally, as the piece de resistance, as soon as we let Zoe into the back yard to relieve herself she found an unpleasant something left by a roving animal, rolled in it, and ended up having to have a bath to remove the odor! Our homecoming could have been better, to say the least.

Put back into perspective, however, it was an excellent trip that we all three enjoyed. We were a little early for much color, but conversely we had excellent weather for all the sightseeing portion, whereas had we gone later it would have been much colder and wetter. We saw a lot, got lots of good exercise, and managed to work in lots of shopping, mostly for stuff we will appreciate for years. Zoe got to learn to love beaches and big lakes, and a measure of freedom during which she became much better behaved. Along with all that, we also got to spend time with dear family friends we hadn't seen in so long - a successful trip indeed!

We covered 440.4 miles for this final leg of our trip, which brought our grand total, door to door, to 2361.2 (Two thousand, three hundred and sixty one) - quite a jaunt!