Roadtrip Recap: Days Five - Six

[Please note this post will probably be more incoherent than usual as I am watching the first NFL game of the season (Fuck you Brett Favre!) while composing this. Which reminds me that I should do a Bears preview post before Sunday for what promises to be another woeful season. Is it October yet?]

So I'm gonna finish the Canadian portion of the way overdue trip recap now. Thank Jebus.

The Mayors of My Life

I've got the final recap of my roadtrip in the pipeline (after finally finishing uploading 340 photos - yeesh!), but we interrupt my slacking to bring you some Breaking News!

HO-LEE SHEEEIT!

Amy texted me at work to tell me Mayor Daley wasn't seeking a seventh term as mayor. For those who don't live in Chicago, this is a BIG DEAL. Shocking - I honestly thought he was going to stay in office until he had a chest grabber like his old man, Richard J. 42 of the last 55 years has had a Daley running Chicago, so it's going to be hard to imagine this city Daley-less. Not to mention all the $$$ we're going to end up spending peeling Richie's name off of every surface that matters in this town. Seeing as "Da Mare" has been in power since I was in 8th grade (ack), I thought I'd take this opportunity to look back on the Mayors of Chicago in my lifetime.

RIP Rocket

Not to be a downer, but our hamster Rocket went to the big wheel in the sky sometime last night/this morning. I'll wax poetic about him and my love of hamsters in general later, but I wanted to take a second to honor his memory. We got him at a shelter last year, and he was a "senior" hamster at that point (meaning he was about a year old or so), but we adopted him anyway. This is one of my favorite pictures of him - if you look closely at him, you'll notice there's a piece of poo stuck on his head. I found this hilarious, especially when he got annoyed and resisted when we tried to get it off of him.

We were blessed to have this little old guy for over a year. Your mommies will miss you and never forget you!

[Shit I'm crying again and I'm out of Kleenex. ANYway, back to my usual stupidity shortly - I want to finish blogging the damn roadtrip by the end of the holiday weekend]

Roadtrip Recap: Days Three & Four

At the rate I'm going, by the time I finish this, I'll be on my next vacation. Or the NHL season will have started.

Anyway.

Roadtrip Recap: Days One & Two

Well I haven't gotten this recap up as quickly as I'd like. For gods sake I'm only at the halfway point of uploading all of the pictures I took. It really has taken me the week after the trip to get my bearings and a somewhat stressful week back at work didn't help matters much. I'm not sure if anyone even cares anymore, but I figure I'd better write this down before I get too old and can't remember any of it.

And Here. We. Go.

I Hath Returned

OK, I really did mean to attempt to blog while on my road trip, but due to the fact I passed out most evenings when we got back to our hotel (humidity + walking for miles makes me tired), this did not happen. Aside from that, we had multiple issues with internet access: one motel's idea of wi-fi was like a 28.8 modem and another hotel was equipped with only an Ethernet cord that Amy's laptop did not like. We also encountered, unbeknown to us, we were going to incur "International Roaming Charges" on our iPhones while in Canada (Fuck you AT&T) so checking the net for three days was verboten unless we could get wi-fi on the smart phones.

But aside from that, it was a fun trip and I'm sad to see it end. I have 1200+ photos to go through. I am only on Day Two of posting them to Flickr so this may take awhile. I will also put up a summary here once I have some time - hopefully this week. In the meantime, here's a list of all of the places we stayed/stopped at during our eight days:

Chicago-South Bend, IN-Bryan, OH-Toledo-Cleveland-Ashtabula, OH-Conneaut, OH-Erie, PA-Silver Creek, NY-Buffalo, NY-Niagara Falls, NY-Niagara Falls, ONT-Toronto-London, ONT-Southfield, MI-Detroit-Hamtramck, MI-Ann Arbor, MI-Chicago

Needless to say I put over 1,200 miles on my car. He performed admirably.

And now it's to bed as I'm sure there are various disasters I must fix when I'm back at work tomorrow. HUGE SIGH

Vacation Time!

So I fully intended to do an in-depth and informative post, as you will always receive here on afoui (*snort*), regaling you of vacations of days past and a preview of what is to come this week. Unfortunately work kicked my ass all week, resulting in long hours and most evenings spent falling asleep in front of the TV - I am turning into my father. So seeing as it's past midnight and we're getting up at 7am in order to hit the road early, a scant paragraph or two is just gonna have to do.

Saturday: Cleveland
Sunday/Monday: Niagara Falls/Buffalo
Tuesday-Thursday: Toronto
Friday: Detroit
Saturday: HOME!

We don't have too much planned for certain. We're doing the Rock and Roll HOF in Cleveland, Niagara Falls of course, and the Hockey HOF in Toronto - I've already bought my tickets for that bitches! Expect a lot of photos of old signs and the other off beat shit I like to take pictures of. I predict I will get at least two blisters, sun burnt once and probably eat something that won't agree with me. But I don't care - I love vacations, and I am increasingly loving going on road trips - there's just so many cool and strange things to see when you drive.

I'll attempt to make a post or two on here during our time on the road, but I will be tweeting and probably throwing pictures on flickr too. So if you're so inclined, check out the links on the right.

Later!