Ring Ring Ring Ring...Banana Phone!

The song is stuck in my head now.

Why? Because we brought this artificial banana with us on vacation and Dave has been charged with photographing it everywhere. Yes, like Flat Stanley. The pictures of this banana as it travels across America are being assembled in a photo album for one of Dave's colleagues, who uses this banana as punishment for those who arrive at his unit's physical training sessions late.

Enjoy the pictures of each of the states we crossed so far today on our eastward journey...banana and all:

From 2009 06 13 VacationEastDay1

From 2009 06 13 VacationEastDay1

From 2009 06 13 VacationEastDay1

From 2009 06 13 VacationEastDay1

Tomorrow we continue on I-80 all the way to New York City. According to our GPS, it should only be about 7-8 hours worth of driving (compared to 10.5 hours today). We hope to be out of our hotel by 0800, try to get to NY before dark.

Greetings from Lake Michigan

We stopped with Andy, Suzy and their kids on the lakeshore for just
over an hour. Between about 4-5pm, 8 hours into our drive. It was
cool and breezy, but the water wasn't bad and Timmy got pretty wet.
The kids did lots of running around and I think the exercise did them
some good.
This is at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, near Chesterton, IN.

Yay! We Can Still See Out the Back!

ROAD TRIP!

Tomorrow morning we leave on vacation.

"Whoo hoo! It's about friggin' time! You haven't really had a real vacation in a couple years, have you?"

No, I guess not. We had that fabulous trip to Fort Fisher/Kure Beach, NC back in July 2007. That was a really fun time, the most relaxed I'd ever been, I think. Andy and Suzy are really good at relaxing and worked wonders on me!

Sometimes if I wonder if spending 2 weeks with parents, siblings, aunts and uncles really constitutes a "vacation". I know for the boys it will definitely be a "vacation" -- seeing all 4 grandparents and their cousins will be such a treat. Especially my side of the family, since they haven't seen my parents since Memorial Day weekend of last year, and my sister's family since last July.

So today I'm busily packing, straightening up the house, mowing the lawn extra short, cleaning out the fridge and doing those other little things that you want taken care of before you leave the house empty for 16 days. I'm taking a much-needed break right now to vegge on the couch and write about this.

Our plans are to drive for 2 days straight, this Saturday and Sunday. We hope to get to Fremont, OH by Saturday night, where we have a hotel reservation, and then on Sunday, go from Fremont to Dave's parents house on Long Island. I-80 all the way. Dave and I aren't really looking forward to plowing through Iowa, Illinois and Indiana...no offense to those from those great states, but it's not going to be very interesting to us.

We received an invitation from Andy and Suzy (the ones mentioned above from our Fort Fisher trip) to join them at a camp site they'll be at in Indiana this weekend. On Lake Michigan. We think it'll be close enough off I-80 that we could perhaps stop for a late lunch. We'll see.

So we plan to spend 4-5 days in New York, with plans to hit the beach and New York City while there. Then we'll go to Pennsylvania for Father's Day weekend, which is the traditional weekend for the Vollmer Family Reunion. Last summer I realized I didn't blog about any of it, only about the piece of tire that destroyed the front grill of our Prius in Richmond, VA.

The Vollmer Reunion (there are actually other families than just "Vollmers" involved, since they married other families and they are all welcome) has been something I've been able to be part of since 1994. That summer, Dave invited me down from my summer semester at PSU to join him. I can't believe I've been going to "Uncle Jack's Farm" for 15 years now! Of course, Dave has been going since -- well, since forever! It's really touching seeing our boys experience the same things that Dave was able to when he was the same age: Uncle Jack's sheep, the merry-go-round, the peanut toss, the hay rides!

After the reunion weekend, we plan to go from PA down to my parents' house in West Virginia by dinnertime, so we can take my Dad out to dinner. I'm excited that we have a chance to spend Father's Day with both Dave's Dad and my Dad...perhaps a first! My parents now live just over 2 hours from where the reunion will be, they moved from VA to WV last summer.

We'll spend the rest of our time at my parents' house, where we have trips to Hersheypark and Washington, D.C. planned. I'd like to take the boys to the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall (we went to the Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport last summer).

Then we drive back the weekend of the 27th, and we're planning another stop with Andy and Suzy and we'll spend a day in Dayton, OH. We always enjoy Dayton (Dave and I were stationed there in 2000-2002 and had a wonderful time!). We should be home the night of the 28th.

For the next couple weeks I'll probably be doing short little posts like the ones I did last summer during our move between NC and NE. The boys and I have been discussing which states we'll travel through between here and NY, so I'll be making a point to photograph all the "Welcome" signs for each of the states: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

Ta! We'll try to stay safer than last summer!