This is a paste from another forum but I am too lazy to be creative. I/we just got back Sunday, from a week long trip ending up at Hillsdale , Michigan and Sharon's Nephews wedding..
Got back to find the lawn , up North, that was mowed the day before we left, has a lot of yellow grass from heat stress. I had watered part of it the day before we left as a small part already showed heat stress, but parts that looked just find also were yellow.
The lawn mower was making odd sounds when I mowed so I checked the blade, and found my new blade bent up on one side.
The yellow streaks in the lawn show how exactly the pattern I used mowing so , I should also check to see if one of the wheel settings changed.
Tis raining, needed badly now, so the lawn should recover.
The trip was a total of 1,655 miles and Sharon's 2004 Mercury Marquis managed 24.8 miles per gallon for the whole trip.
She gave Sammy, 500 bucks for his college graduation the week before and another 500 bucks for his wedding present plus paid Missy, Sam's mother, 300 for the BnB she had rented for all family members, plus another approx. 200 bucks for the two motels were also stayed at,
SO, she said you can pay for the gasoline - which was only 248 dollars.
We only gambled at one casino, Hardrock Casino, in Indiana, as Sharon won nothing and I got greedy but still walked out with 32 more dollars than I walked in with.
We went to Holland , Michigan to see the windmill and look at the tulips; Holland signs to find places (the town is lay out is a cluster f , on one side) are set in a pee-poor manner (which the ticket lady said a LOT of people say) and one had better check traffic pattern before going as it is one-way, then not one-way , then one-way again. After two days I had pretty much figured it out.
We went to several antique shops; one was very nice . I found two very, very old eye glass frames , so when the one I use goes pffft, I have a replacement.
Very nice people running the place; the other was OK, but that is all.
Michigan State has poor to non-existant road signage once one out in the boonies.
I missed a turn on M40 and ended up out in the boonies, navigating by the Sun. We came to a burg, really just an intersection, with a gas station, and there
WERE several road signs there showing that if we kept going the direction we were, at that point, we were going back to where we had been two days ago.
I asked the dude in the gas station how to get to M40, he said I am not from here and do not know but, fortunately , another customer heard what I said and told me to go back up the hill and go straight till I hit a stop sign and that will be M40.
We were only approx. 8 miles off track.
I had found by checking my chosen roads that we were going through Kalamazoo and that there was a large Air Museum there ,
Air Zoo, so I, Sharon's back is bothering here so she patiently waited in the car, spent two hours there.
A place I have to get back to by myself so I can dawdle away time there.
I also like to check on the computer for what eating joints are along the paths we choose. I found a nice but under whelming Mexican restaurant in Holland , But, in Kalamazoo, I found, --
LEE'S FAMOUS Recipe Chicken. Bought an 8 piece box and it was good but some of the pieces looked like they came off Bantam Hens.
Driving through Chicago used to be bumper to bumper at 60-70 mph, I miss those days.
It was bumper to bumper at either approx. 20 mph to just plain stop and go.
I took us 45 minutes during Friday afternoon rush hour, and ARRRHH, one and one-half hours on Sunday afternoon.
I asked a woman from Chicago when we stopped at the Casino had traffic slowed waaay down from what it once was; she said yes, they changed the road layout to slow people down and NO ONE likes it. The old way was better.
I still had my bull-in-china-shop driving abilities, and we forced our way in and out of lanes as needed. I was amazed Sharon did not get frantic and was very handy to have as one can only look one way at a time, BUT, she often read signs for cars in a totally different, set of lanes, and that got to be annoying on the way home.
I did find that taking the All-EXITS lanes, were in the long run quicker than the Express Way 94, as where the two versions of 94 would merge, the express lanes had traffic backed up for a lot longer.
I was going to avoid the Loop and take 290 till I saw the exit lane to 290 was miles long , so I stayed on the loop.
The closest, and it was CLOSE, I came to an accident was on U.S. 12 about ten miles from the North border, when the car in front of me accelerated to beat Yellow and so did I, then he jammed on his brake.
Sharon started yelling, not screaming, Bob-Bob-Bob which returned my eyes to the car in front of me from watching other traffic.
I jammed on the brakes, started turning into the other lane (out of the corner of my eye I saw the car next to me already braking and turning onto the shoulder) and was VERY pleased for the anti-brake lock system on her car.
We ended up at a slight angle, mostly, in the lane to our right about three feet from the car in front of us.
No one uses their horns in Michigan, Indiana or Illinois.
After that Sharon became a Nagging-Nellie about how fast I was going (I wanted to get home a quickly as possible) when we were in heavy traffic in where every one was going 80-85 mph.
She kept yelling to, slow down, go 75, slow down, etc. even though we were tens of feet from other cars.
After traffic became less she quit that and mellowed out.
All in all, it was a very good trip.
