Vacation Day One

We left home around 6:30 on Thursday morning. We decided to skip Starbucks and ate breakfast at home before we left (I am never going to get to use that giftcard!) Adam also brought along a 6-pack of 5 Hour Energy shots to substitute for coffee. I did a final cleaning in the cat rooms, we made sandwiches for lunch, made sure the oven wasn't on, and took off.

We made our usual stop at the truck stop by Mars Cheese Castle. We hit Chicago around 9:30. It was a bit slow for a little while, but pretty much no big deal. There wasn't really any construction delays this time at all. Amazing. We hit the Indiana State line around 10. The EZ Pass transponder was a good investment. It worked at all the tollways except for those in Ohio (although it looked like they were in the process of installing the equipment so perhaps that will change soon.) Indiana and Ohio are so boring, with not much in terms of scenery. We stopped at a travel plaza to get gas and answer nature's call. We ate lunch in the car so we didn't have to stop for that. I did give into an urge and buy a chocolate chip bagel from Panera at one stop in Ohio. It was good.

We got to our hotel in Mars (ie Cranberry) in good time. We stayed at the Super 8, which was surprisingly nice. It had recently been renovated (as evidenced by the "wet paint" sign on our door as the varnish was still a little tacky.) It had a fridge in the room so we could empty the cooler for the night to keep things fresh. We unloaded and then walked across the street for dinner. It was a goal of mine on this trip to eat at places we can't eat at locally, and definitely no fast food. Tuesday night we went to Lone Star. We used to have one in Appleton but it closed a while back. I had their soup (chicken pot pie), salad (wow, tons of dressing. Left most of it uneaten), & potato combo and Adam had a steak & shrimp combo. The Steelers happened to have a pre-season game that night so after we returned to the hotel we watched a little bit of that. But the combination of getting up at 5am and losing an hour along the way ended up with us going to sleep at like 7. Sad.