My alarm went off at six, and I had been dreaming about rain. In the dream I was high in the mist of the West Virginia mountains, lying on my back in the middle of the road as the rain fell down, and I was soaked and melting into the wet pavement.

It took a second for the alarm to register. I grabbed my cell phone, turn it off, and groaned.

Must... peel self... off... air mattress.

I showered and packed up my things, and around seven, Errol and I took off up Indiana.

We stopped and got gas, and I ran into a Starbucks to get us some coffee. Inside, a chipper barista said "Good morning!" in a voice that was entirely too bright for this hour of the morning.

"Two... big... coffees."

"You look tired," he clucked as he made the coffee. As I unfolded dollar bills to hand to him, he stuffed a donut and coffee cake into a bag. "Here," he said. "On the house. You look like you've got a long way to go."

"Thank you."

Outside, I got into the car with the spoils. "Some guy thought I looked so sleepy he gave me baked goods," I told Errol.

"Oh?"

"Or maybe he thought I was cute, so he gave me baked goods."

"Maybe," Errol suggested, "he thought you looked cute when you were sleepy."

"Maybe. Or maybe he was just nice."

We drove on.

Errol sat in the driver's seat and I took pictures from the passenger seat until I drifted off to sleep. By the time we reached Indianapolis, we hit rush hour traffic, and I woke up and began to highlight bits of the atlas as we crawled through the city. I fell asleep again and woke up when we were clear of the city and driving straight along I-65. The landscape was flat and sprinkled with farmland and small towns, and I put on a CD and stared out the window as we continued.

Eventually, as the coffee we'd gotten began to take hold, conversation began to tumble out. We talked about our roommates and then our families, told various stories about our parents and ourselves, and passed the time as the flat green farmland flitted past.

We got up around Gary (city motto: "Not even an eighth as good as the song promises!") and began to head toward Chicago. Just before approaching the city, we stopped at a gas station. Errol filled up and I got quarters and went to the bathroom. While back outside, I realized that I was hungry (the donut didn't fill me up), so I ordered a breakfast sandwich. The woman behind the counter was very nice, so we chatted for a bit. Errol came out of the bathroom and we waited for my sandwich.

After a few minutes, it was in a travel bag, and the woman pushed it toward me and said "So sorry about the wait! I put a hashbrown in there 'cause it took so long."

Back in the car, I explained the idea of Midwestern friendliness and hospitality to Errol. "People out here are just nicer," I said.

We got on I-90 to go around Chicago, but we hadn't been there for more than a few miles when there were signs telling us that I-90 was closed due to construction and to seek an alternate route. This set off a chain of events that, an hour later, had us still hovering around Chicago. We made wrong turns, got onto strange roads, and, at one point, Errol forgot himself and we ended up on the wrong side of a concrete divider. As I instructed him to "turn around," (okay, so, it was "Ahhhh we need to turn around this is the wrong side of the road ahhhhh!"), a cop noticed that we were, I don't know, ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD, flashed his lights at us. I had a horrible sinking feeling. Were we going to get a ticket?

He drove over and blocked our car from the rest of the traffic (not that there was much) and asked us where we were going. We told him.

"Ah, okay," he said. "You just need to take this exit back to..."

He gave us directions that would take us exactly where we needed to go. Then he told us to be safe. Then he drove away.

"SEE?" I said. "People in the Midwest are just freaking awesome. So nice."

We took the detour and swung around Chicago. Up through Illinois, I put in Sufjan Steven's Come On Feel the Illinoise!, which was lovely. As we made our way through Illinois, I called my grandmother to let her know we would be there soon.

As soon as we crossed over the border of Wisconsin ("TOWANDA!"), I feel giddy with nostalgia. Ever since I was a little girl, we'd do the two day drive from PA to Wisconsin to see my mother's family. I haven't been back since before I went to college. And here it was, beautiful farmland and fragrant air and blue skies. We hit Janesville and went west to Evansville, where my grandmother lives. As we drove, I fired off every story I could remember about my cousins and my grandparents and visiting this state.

Evansville has changed. The Coach House has burned down, the pharmacy has been moved, and the endless cornfields behind my grandmother's old house - the fields where my cousin Jessica and I used to run and eat raw sweet corn in messy, decadent quantities - have been covered up with a huge housing development. It made my throat feel raw.

When we pulled into Kelly House, I got out of the car, grabbed my left ankle with my right hand, and bent down to the ground, letting everything pop as I bent over. I did the same with my other leg.

Inside, my grandmother was waiting. She'll be ninety next month, and she looks fantastic. A little hard of hearing (to be expected), but still the same feisty woman I'd always remembered. She introduced me to all of her nurses ("This is my granddaughter, Carmen. She's moving to California!")

I drove her to a local restaurant (seeing as there were only two seats in Beatrice, I had to take her and then go back and get Errol) and we had lunch (only in rural Wisconsin can you get a triple decker sandwich, fries, pickles, and soup for five dollars). We talked about the cousins and aunts and uncles, the marriages and pregnancies and divorces and children and adoptions. It was so good to see her. She was a little frailer than I remembered - and was the skin of her hand just more slightly translucent? - but overall she looked wonderful.

She made me promise to call. I took her back to Kelly House and gave her a kiss and hug (but not before taking her picture, which is the last one in the previous post) and then hopped back on the road. I swung around to the restaurant to pick up Errol. He was inside, chatting with a gentleman. I asked him, as we climbed back into the car, who that was.

"He saw that I was sitting alone and started chatting with me." Errol looked amazed. "I see what you mean about Midwestern friendliness."

We left Evansville and headed to Madison. We picked up the beltway around the city and went to Attic Angels to visit Mrs. Jacobs, a very, very old friend of my mother's and my "fairy god grandmother." She's a ninety-six year old woman with an incredible life story*, funny as hell, and lots of fun to be around. We spent an hour and a half talking to her.

"I'm so proud of you, Carmen," she said. "You can do anything. The world has opened herself up to you."

We left Attic Angels around four-thirty and made our way toward my Uncle Nick's house. We got a little turned around and ended up in downtown Madison near the capitol building, but with the GPS and sheer patience we found Nick's house.

I love my Uncle Nick. He's a dear, sweet man, and it was so nice to see him again. He gave us a tour of his trees and mulch and shrubs and then made his special recipe fish (with fish that he caught himself in Canada). He then helped me figure out the route for tomorrow and gave me a bigger Wisconsin map than the one in my atlas.

Another awesome thing: I actually got to see all three of Nick's kids! They're all cousins who are older than me, but he managed to wrangle them all together. I haven't seen them in... well, a very, very long time. It was so good to see them. What's even cooler is that my cousin Tim is actually moving to Colorado soon, so I might be seeing more of him in the near future (not on this trip, but when I get out to Colorado again).

Anyway, it's really late, and I need to sleep. I hope you're all doing well. Tomorrow: House on the Rock, the Summer Kitchen, Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Tom in Savage, MN. Yay!

*which I will tell, in as much detail as I know, at a later date