Thursday May 20, 2010 - Oconomowoc, Wisconsin to Minneapolis, Minnesota

We got up bright and early to pack the van up. Our system is working pretty well, and we were out of our place by 9:30am and on the road. It's a long, simple drive. Just over three hundred miles westward on I-94 to the Twin Cities. Just one stop along the way to give the kids a picnic/leftover lunch at a rest stop. They loved the opportunity to stop, eat, and run - more or less in that order. A bright and sunny day, and clear sailing all the way.

We hit traffic big-time once we got into St. Paul & Minneapolis, though. Google Maps (which I've relied on almost exclusively for navigation on our trip) kept us on I-94 all the way into and through the downtown area. What I realized afterwards was that it would have been equidistant almost, and certainly a lot faster, to have routed us on I-694 to skirt the north side of the city. Our hotel ended up being at the first exit after the 694 and the 94 converge. It would have saved us at least 30 minutes in stop and go traffic.

Once we got our room, I decided to give Gena a little breather and took the kids to the indoor pool. They were ecstatic, to say the least. They swam for about an hour. Alec was practicing some of the swimming strokes he remembered from his swimming lessons earlier this year and last year. Mika and Caedmon are not interested in "getting their eyes wet" and so I was able to coax them into jumping to me from the steps leading into the water. They had much fun with this after a great deal of initial trepidation.

After drying off and dressing, we set off to find dinner. I had promised the kids pizza. Partly, this was based on their discovery of Man vs. Food on the Travel Channel over the last couple of evenings. The kids were absolutely mesmerized by this guy and all the food he could and would eat. I took this as a learning opportunity with our more finicky eater (Alec) of all the possibilities that would open up to him as he learned to like different foods. That guy is pretty cool, isn't he? He goes all over the country and eats all sorts of different foods. If you eat lots of different foods, imagine the places you might go?

As an editorial aside, I'm grateful for the still-limited cognitive abilities of our children. Alec could have easily pointed out that he's been in 23 states in less than three months, and by the end of our travels will have traversed the nation from coast to coast and back again. All without the unpleasant necessity of trying very many new foods. Fortunately, he did not make this connection.

Instead, he immediately vowed that he was going to try new foods, and that he would begin with sausage pizza. It took some convincing for him to believe me when I told him that he had already eaten sausage pizza and liked it, even though his go-to pizza is a basic pepperoni. Not to be deterred from his new goal, he declared that his first culinary escapade would then be a sausage and pepperoni pizza. I gave up attempting to remind him that he had indeed already had this sort of pizza as well and liked it. After all, if we want our kids to have broad tastes, starting them off with a guaranteed successful experience seems like the wise thing to do.

So it was that we found ourselves in northwestern Minneapolis searching for pizza. How hard could that be? I thought to myself. You can't hardly throw a stick in most cities without hitting at least one pizza joint. Oh, how foolish of me. We drove around the greater northwestern (and central) Minneapolis area for an hour without finding a pizza place. To be more accurate, we found immediately the one advertised in our helpful hotel in-room information, but decided it looked a little rougher than we thought we needed to settle for.

An hour. Of driving around and not finding a pizza place. My frustration was epic. Ask Gena. We decided to settle for the BBQ place next door to our hotel - but that was going to be another 30-minute wait. We hit the road again. Our eventual dining option?

Denny's.

I can't adequately express how sick of Denny's Gena and I got on our many, many trips between St. Louis and Tempe during seminary. Denny's was the kids' favorite option, and I think we memorized the menu - and not in a good way. But this seemed to be truly the only option we could find that seemed reasonably clean and available.

But it gets weirder.

Mika & Alec opted for pancake kids meals, which is an easy choice since they love breakfast as dinner. Caedmon apparently was not to be deterred from the promise of pizza, though. He ordered the kids cheese pizza with the side of grapes. When it arrived, I nearly hurled. The Pit Stop Pizza did not resemble a pizza in any sense of the word other than it had a crust. The sauce was a very strange dark maroon color - darker than any normal tomato-based sauce has a right to be on a kids pizza. The cheese looked plastic-y and melted on unnaturally. It was even oblong instead of round.

Caedmon decides that he's going to eat his pizza with mustard. Skeptical, I put a squirt of mustard on his plate. He proceeds to dip & eat the abomination-of-a-pizza dipped in mustard. It was getting harder and harder to keep my own dinner down. He decided to sample the grapes in mustard, and found that to his liking as well. I gave him more mustard, and he continued to sock away the pizza. Gena suggested, mockingly, that he might like a little drop of maple syrup in his mustard to dip his pizza in. He immediately agreed that this sounded great, and proceeded to eat every drop of it. He finished the whole disgusting pizza.

Certainly that's enough of an evening right there, is it not? Oh, but gentle reader, it does not end there. Oh no.

One of the soundtracks to our massive family vacation of doom is the Dr. Demento CD. I through it into our CD-changer at the last minute before packing up the last of our CDs in Camarillo. I figured it would be a humorous change of pace from time to time. Little did I know at that point that my grand plan to upgrade the van's stereo system was going to be delayed by 7000 miles, and that the only music we'd have consistently available was in our CD-changer. I might have opted for a different selection to round out the other nine, more musically oriented CDs.

The kids definitely grew to enjoy Dr. Demento's collection of classic bizarre songs. A lot. Mika became obsessed with "Marvin I Love You", mostly because it annoys the heck out of Alec. They like "Star Trekkin'" despite not being able to decipher 80% of the words and none of the actual references to the TV series. And they very much, very very much enjoy "Fish Heads". Alec and Mika particularly enjoy changing the words randomly to 'Mika heads' or 'Alec heads', which inevitably results them doubling over in laughter. All well and good when you're sealed in a mini-van cruising down a freeway at 80 mph. Not quite as well and good when you're sitting in a Denny's trying to finish your meal and get out without puking at your youngest son's bizarre dipping predilections.

Alec and Mika engaged in a rousing and at times quite loud performance of one of the song's verses and of course the refrain - which is easier to remember. "They can't play baseball, they don't wear sweaters, they're not good dancers, they don't play drums". We hushed and shushed and attempted to keep their voices down, but as many of you know, Alec's voice in particular does not default to a discrete volume level. We finally left after about 10 minutes of this impromptu and unmufflable performance.

Almost makes you wish you were here, doesn't it?

The evening ended on a brighter note, though. I was able to meet up with my friend Kjel for a beer at Grumpy's. It was a nice time together after a year of pretty major transitions for both of us. Someday, when we develop the bizarre/unusual ministry that we hope to, Kjel will be a regular visiting artist/lecturer. For now, we settle for roughly annual meet-ups for beer and theological and artistic discussion. It works well enough.