Dateline: Watertown

The worst thing so far about this trip has been a sudden snap of Arctic cold air. It’s not even 40 degrees outside; our entire trip was through cloudy skies and most of it was rainy. There was a terrible wreck between two tractor-trailer rigs in Lexington, Kentucky; it took us nearly an hour to get through a small college town. That, in turn, caused us to hit Chicago at 5:00 Central time. It took us as long to get from Gary, Indiana to Addison Drive as it did to get from Indianapolis to Gary. Most of the time, we were in rain. The Wife drove from Covington, Kentucky to a point about twenty miles south of Indianapolis. She also drove from the Illinois Tollway travel oasis (home of the gyro that ate Sheboygan) to New Berlin, Wisconsin. 700 miles later, we’re at my in-laws’ house.

I like my in-laws; they’re nice folks. The only trepidation I felt about coming here was that the house has no heat in the upstairs guest bedroom and the shower lacks substantial water pressure. But they’ve done something since we were here last; there is some more pressure than I remember and the water got hotter than I remembered, so that was a big plus. Sleeping upstairs still involves using about six comforters on the bed. Today the agenda is to drop off my in-laws’ dog Bosco (the big old guy to the right) to be doggie-sat while my in-laws travel to Seattle to meet up with family (including my brother-in-law, who will fly up to meet them from Long Beach), watching The Da Vinci Code, and dinner at a nice restaurant in the nearby city of Johnson’s Creek.

When we got here, my in-laws did not think that there would be any “high tech” stuff like wireless internet anywhere near here, and that we’d have to all the way into Madison to find something like that. Of course, things are a little bit more widespread than that; there is a coffee shop right here in Watertown. They were blown away that such a thing would be right here in little old Watertown. I'm not a big fan of the "world music" being played here, but that's as it is.