This morning, Chandler and I were looking at the United States and we told each other 'we should go on over to Michigan and see the Great Lakes and come home through Ohio. It's practically the same distance!' To prove this, we stretched the yarn marking the current route over to the shoreline of Lake Michigan and then straight to the AL state line-same distance! While we would miss Kansas and Nebraska that route, we'd pick up Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio. And, as Chandler pointed out, lots of good public radio comes from Chicago, and we could listen to it on WBEZ. Maybe actually GO to see Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. Or meet Ira Glass.
Then we started looking at going further, staying longer. If we don't eat out often and camp every night and...*sigh* I really do wish we could just drive and see until the tires fall off the van, sell it for the payoff amount plus bus fare and shipping our stuff back and then take a Greyhound home from wherever we end up. Just head out and come back in the fall, full of stories, with so many photos I have to buy an external hard drive. Come home with bags stuffed with with postcards and rocks, maps and brochures. To argue over where exactly we were when we saw the bear or the moose or that porcupine. With shoes caked in dirt from a dozen different states, with blister stories or new scars from some adventure or another, with a hole in our favorite tee from getting it snagged hiking 'somewhere in the Rockies'. With tan lines from swimming in the desert and one from swimming in the Great Lakes and a different one from the afternoon on the coast of Maine when we threw rocks into the Atlantic and screamed when the seagulls swooped us.
I want to get in the van, camping gear and cameras, clothes and laptop on board, headlights pointed that-a-way and gooooooooooo.
