Wednesday, June 28: We drove uneventfully all morning, with the greatest excitement happening when Will got out his portable ham radio and sought to make contact with fellow hammers. No such luck, just a little bit of static, but that is music to our ears. In Evanston we found a grocery store and then a park to have lunch. Eric was going to drive after lunch, so he was looking at the atlas. It showed Rocky Mountains north of I-84 and again south of I-84. Will told him he wouldn’t be driving through them, but he liked what the map said. When we finished lunch, he said, “Let’s go, I have the Rocky Mountains to drive through!” But his dad was right. Eric does enjoy the 75 mph speed limit. As he was driving through town, he observed an elderly driver not using signals, and said, “I’ve noticed two things about people’s driving when they get old. They either don’t signal at all or they signal and leave it on.”
Later on when Will was driving, a huge bug splattered on the windshield. Nick thought it was cool, I found it repulsive and wanted it removed. Will didn’t want to smear the whole windshield. “Please,” I said, “There’s lots of wiper fluid.” His response was, “Put on your big girl panties and deal with it.” Big smile. “I’ve been waiting two days for the chance to say that.” He had seen it on a t-shirt in one of the dumb outlet mall stores.
We stopped in Laramie to get a motel. I had been pointing out the Super 8 signs along the freeway, but he pulled up to the first hotel we came to, a very nice new AmeriHost. I told him it would be too expensive. We went in together to check it out. He tells the clerk, “So how much do you want for a room here? My wife thinks it would be too expensive for us.” Well, the clerk responded very nicely to his charm and gave us a discount so we could afford it. Then Will wants to know where we could get a cheap dinner. She said if we wanted to wait until 10:00 when she got off work, we could come to her house. We thanked her but accepted to pizza coupons she offered instead. Will let the boys get refills on their Mt. Dews at dinner. They say caffeine doesn’t affect them at all. They had quite a travel pillow fight in the back seat of the car when we pulled into the motel. Our friendly clerk saw it, and when we walked in, she told those boys they better have all their pillow fighting out of their system for the night!
It really was a beautiful new motel. There was great peace of mind knowing that I wouldn’t find any tiny green plants growing in the mold on the bathroom window as happened at a cheap motel on our first trip coming back from the Oswald reunion in 1992. In fact, after several nights of problems during that trip, including moving three children and all our stuff out of a room into another one because of some malfunction, a pair of women’s underwear hanging over the shower curtain that didn’t belong to any of us, and damp carpeting with a snag that he tripped over, he vowed he was through with cheap motels and we got one that was absolutely beautiful with log furniture in Arizona.
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