roadtrippin': day one

Day One: lots of car. I think I need to get used to that because this is, afterall, a roadtrip. And part of what is inherent to a roadtrip is, well, road. We made great time heading across Indiana and Illinois into Iowa, but encountered some slightly scary storms around Crawfordsville, Indiana. We stopped for lunch and heard the tornado sirens going off...Mom asked the guy at the restaurant if they happen to do tornado drills at 2:20 on Wednesdays (I know, right?). His reply, "Nope, it's every Friday- that's the real thing. You might want to head to the Target across the street if you're from outta town." Fantastic. Thanks for the heads up. Sidenote: I'm really starting to worry about the planet since it seems everywhere you look lately the sky is black at some point during the day. We've angered her it seems.

We got into Dubuque, Iowa around 7 p.m. and checked into Hotel Julien (beautiful) where the decor and class is remarkably similar to Bellagio, right down to the marble countertops in the bathroom and the brushed pewter drawer pulls. Dinner was nice at the Pepper Sprout, but despite the amazing brie and roasted garlic appetizer, it became a tad bit tense after Mom and I got into a relatively spirited conversation about relationships. I practically jumped up onto my soapbox and started preaching about how important it is in a relationship to have space and separate interests or else it'll never work, you'll want to kill each other, and you'll spend your lives miserable and codependent. This *may* have had something to do with the fact that her mobile phone rang at approximately half hour intervals all day. I finally snapped when the host at the restaurant came up to our table with their house phone in hand, saying to my mom, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but Tom wants to know why you're not answering your cell phone..." Really? Aaaaaaahhhhh..... SNAP. That was me, cracking like an egg. I bit my lip, focused intently on my Strongbow cider, and tried not to say anything I might regret. I'm kind of allergic to conflict these days, so I felt extremely bad saying anything- but several phone calls an hour, including one to the restaurant, is a bit much. So I don't think it was passive aggressive of me in the slightest to climb up on my "no more codependent relationships" soapbox when given the opportunity...

Anyway, I got back from dinner and updated Flickr with some posts. I'm trying to figure out how to do all this "keeping track of the trip stuff" online without being too redundant. Hmmm......onward into Day Two, stay tuned...