Saturday, May 27, 2000
So here we are on the road again, heading for Martin’s place but by a very indirect route. We just had an early lunch at Schlepp’s family restaurant, and boy was it good! My sons have remarked on the fact that I talk a lot about where we eat on these Ausflugs. They seem to feel that eating is not important enough to be documented in these chronicles. Ah, but I respectfully disagree! Eating is a very important part of traveling. I think it was Napoleon who said, “An Army marches on its stomach”—either that or “God always seems to be on the side with the heaviest artillery”, I can’t remember which. Although we are in no way military, the former saying, if not the latter, could definitely apply to us. I sometimes am not sure if we eat to walk, or walk to eat.

But as I was saying, Schlepp’s family restaurant outside Morristown, Ohio, had excellent food and lots of it. Monika had the ham and cheese on homemade bread, and I had a roast beef hoagie. The servings were huge, large enough in fact that Monika couldn’t finish hers (Gott sei Dank), and I finished the last ¼ of her sandwich also. The prices were quite reasonable ($11.00 for both of us not counting tip), and we had real plates, metal cutlery, and a red-and-white checked tablecloth, which made it definitely worth the bump up in price from the fast-food category where we usually eat out. This was almost a 5-star restaurant using Holt’s Patented Rating System (price, quality, amount, and ambiance), but the ambiance was hurt by having a continuous stream of country and western music. Fortunately it was not loud, so I could almost consistently ignore it, but every once in a while I would get a snippet of “my girl threw me and my hound out of the pound”, or “my wallet’s as flat as my car tires”. We took a chance on Schlepp’s because the parking lot was full of local cars, which I find to be a good diagnostic clue, and because we were so hungry due to the fact that we hadn’t eaten anything but a banana since 6 a.m. that morning, and we were desperate.

I usually fall asleep when we drive in the car after a large lunch, so Monika is driving. Don’t be too surprised if I zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Oops, well anyway, we are on our way to Columbus, Ohio, for a Volksmarch. Why Columbus? Well there’s always the “Why not?” dodge, but the real reason is that we want to do a Volksmarch in every state and capital, and Columbus is the capital of Ohio. This way we get both the State of Ohio and the capital of Columbus in one fell (10 km) swoop. We don’t have a place to stay tonight yet, though, so it could get interesting when we try to find a hotel after the Volksmarch. The rain was steady but light for a couple of hours, but has let off now so we are driving under a light overcast of white clouds, which makes it very easy on the eyes. Starting at 6 a.m. was a good idea as we had absolutely no backups for the drive out 66 to 495 to 270 to 70 to Breezewood, and made it to the Penn. Turnpike in 2 hours.

Traffic and rain remained light to moderate until we reached Columbus about 2 p.m. We circled around to find the parking garage mentioned in the Starting Point. Our starting point at the Holiday Inn was only 2 blocks from the garage. About 6 different walks are offered in the Columbus area, but we chose one that looped out to Franklin Park which lies East of the downtown. The rain held off while we walked out to the park, and we enjoyed seeing many Victorian-era homes and mansions, most of which were restored. A few were painted in the original gaudy Victorian colors—they may have been repressed about many things, but not about colors!

The park was moderately large and quite pretty. We first came to a Japanese bridge and garden. I thought the bridge in particular had nice lines and looked very graceful. It turned out that there was a special celebration of Asian cultures at the pavilion in the middle of the park, and we detoured to check out all the booths. We saw some dolls from Vietnam, but none of them said, “Take me home” to Monika. Other booths offered Asian food, music CDs, travel services, assorted knickknacks, an example of a rickshaw (I think) from the Philippines and an example of a reed house from Vietnam. I really couldn’t tell if the reed house was a small-scale replica or was meant to the size of an actual house over there—I spent my 2 years in the Army in Oklahoma and never got to Vietnam.

I was saved from my tendency to make impulse purchases by the cold, hard fact that whatever I bought I would have to carry back for 5 kilometers—somehow that makes anything other than food much less appealing. When we really like something, we will buy and carry it the distance, but you have to really truly like it. After sampling the festival, we returned to a large stainless steel sculpture of something (modern art, which often baffles me), and circled around a large glass conservatory that seemed modeled on the Crystal Palace that was in Covent Gardens in England during the late 1800s. Apparently they give tours and that might have been another interesting detour for us but we did want to complete the walk and move on to Dayton for the night, so we turned back toward downtown. The way out to the park and back was along a major route with a lot of traffic. This detracted somewhat from the walk. Neighborhood streets would have made this part of the walk much more pleasant.

It rained a bit on the way back, but this time we had our raingear with and it was a warm rain, so it was no problem. Certainly nothing like “frozen Popsicles” walk we took at Jamestown once where it was 35 degrees, pouring rain, and a wind in our face of at least 20 mph—man was that miserable! At the time Monika was in borderline hypothermia and not happy with me, but now it is a Volksmarch benchmark (just like the “Mud bowl” walk in Pennsylvania where the mud was so thick it almost pulled my boots off!). Ah memories!

Having planned for the eventuality of rain, we had already stamped our books. So we could walk directly back to the car at the end of the walk rather than bother the folks at the Holiday Inn again. As I drove on to Dayton, the traffic was much heavier and there were curious oscillations of the speed of the cars in the left lane. I think it was an “accordion effect” where the folks who came screaming up in the right lane and then cut into the left lane would force the lead person to brake, and the braking would ripple down the chain of cars in the left lane. Sometimes the slowdown was very exaggerated, like from 70 to 55 mph. That meant I couldn’t use cruise control so the drive was a little wearing.

When we arrived in Dayton around 5 p.m., we started to check for hotels. Since it was the Memorial Day weekend, the hotels were filling up early but we found a Days Inn which was on an exit with lots of food choices and a Wal-Mart! We also got a $10 AARP (old fogies) discount—Yeah! After quickly moving in (thunderstorms were coming), we ate at Big Boy to have the salad bar (but I’ll spare my sons the details), and then bought some windshield wiper blades at the Wal-Mart. Having old wiper blades that squeak and chatter is for me as irritating as having an itch that you cannot scratch, which is to say, pretty darn irritating. So I spent a few minutes trimming the new blades with a pen-knife and installing them with brute force, hopefully successfully. Rain is forecast for tomorrow also, so we will see how well it works.

The old blades, of course, go into the “old Buick parts” box in the trunk of the car. I learned to keep the old parts once when I installed new sparkplug wires in a 1960 Chevy V-8 but routed them on top of the exhaust manifold. They worked for about 15 minutes until the manifold heated up enough to melt off the rubber and short them out, but I had providentially thrown the old ones in the trunk so I could re-install them and get the thing back home. So all my cars end up with a box of old sparkplugs, wires, water pumps, alternators, and so forth in the back “just in case”. It gives such a feeling of security!

While I’m typing this, Monika is writing music. That is, she is transposing songs for our recital. Since writing notes requires a very precise handwriting, this does not bode well for Monika, but she is trying (and getting frustrated). We want to buy a computer program that will do this chore, but haven’t found it yet.

We have copied one idea from Helga and Jim, which was the “bags O’ Money” filled with small bills. The only change we made was take 20-dollar bills and a couple of old travelers checks in ours rather than singles. It’s so nice to be able to travel without worrying about cost Always before we were on a fixed budget and had to watch our pennies, but now with the kids out of college we are fiscally irresponsible and happy to be so!

Sunday, 5/28/00
Boy am I stiff and sore at the moment! Fortunately I am sitting in a cushy seat in the Buick while Monika drives us to Champaign-Urbana. I hold the pretzel bag for her and give her water when she needs it, but otherwise I’m free to type. So far this day has been great and we are looking forward to having dinner with Martin.

We slept pretty well and arose around 6:30 a.m. to try out the continental breakfast, which was more continental than breakfast. But the coffee and donut helped Monika get going, and I filled up on Raisin Bran and Frosted Flakes (the only cereals available), plus a bagel. Unfortunately they only had 2% milk, and I could already see that keeping the low-fat diet was going to be very difficult on this trip.

Monika drove us to Muncie. We almost missed the Route 35 turnoff to Muncie because we were so intent on singing German folksongs. When she drives, I’m supposed to navigate. But since my German is weak and I don’t know the melodies of these songs, it takes a lot of concentration on my part, particularly when the lyrics in the book don’t match the words Monika is singing. I get so confused. Anyway, we both looked up at the last minute, saw the sign, and went careening off the interstate towards Muncie.

The 2-lane road there was slower than the interstate but very interesting. Lots of trailers and trailer parks suggested a low-income area, but the houses were nicely maintained in general--no shacks. I also saw many very conservative Christian churches like “Church of God”(no others need apply) and two Nazarene churches. When I was young, some of my friends were Nazarenes, and they couldn’t do anything. We found our way to the start point using the Rand McNally rather than the AAA map, it had more roads and was easier to use. But if we broke down, we could always call AAA (aha, ha, ha!).

The start point in Muncie was the Family Kitchen restaurant, and since a cloudburst began when we signed in, we decided to have breakfast and wait out the rain. I was happy to see they had egg substitutes for the breakfasts, and had 2 eggs, hashed browns, Canadian bacon, and 2 pancakes—Monika had the same with real eggs. It was a hearty breakfast (I’m not sure about low-fat) and lasted us through two Volksmarches.

While we ate we looked over the map. Monika had received her undergraduate degree in Muncie (which she obtained in 3 years) and lived with her sister one year, one year in the dorms, and one year as a nanny for Anne-Marie and Gert Voss. During breakfast she looked at the map and thought the Volksmarch would be passing by the houses of her sister and the Voss’s. Once we started the Volksmarch, however, she didn’t recognize much at first. She was confused since the first part of the Volksmarch wound through a new section of the university that had not been built when she was going to college. Only when we got to the music building did things start looking familiar, allowing her to get oriented. Unfortunately, all the buildings were locked (summer vacation) so we couldn’t get into any of them, but we passed the music building where she spent a lot of her time, the foreign language building and the math building.

After exiting the university, the route went into the neighborhood of the Voss’s, which was a pretty upper-crust neighborhood with big, beautiful old houses. After a first miscue, Monika managed to identify the Voss’s house and we took some pictures of her there. The route lead back around the perimeter of the university including Christy Woods and through the oldest part of the university. Nothing was open except the hotel in the student union, which provided a bathroom break. We passed the statue of Beneficence, the symbol of Ball State University, which gave due credit to the Ball brothers for underwriting the costs of the university (of course!).

On the way back we passed a university shopping area and the neighborhood where Helga and Herb, her first husband, lived from about 1960-1965. We found their old house where we again paused to take pictures. Monika remembered the small front porch area and her corner room from the year she lived there with them. She recalled coming home one day and seeing Herb on the front porch playing with Pamela, who was only 8 or 9 months old at the time and was in a suspended baby seat. Monika asked what they were playing and Herb said “Pick ‘em up”. Monika asked, “How do you play that?”, and Herb said, “She throws 'em down and I pick 'em up!”

I was having a (vicarious) nostalgia attack; vicarious since this was my first visit to Muncie and I was being nostalgic about Monika’s past. This was just before she met me (obviously a pivotal event), and I was glad that she had been attracted enough by the opportunities at Ball State University to stay in the United States, but not attracted enough to any of the guys to stay in Muncie!. We finished our walk and drove on to Indianapolis, driving by Monika’s old dormitory on the way out and again taking pictures.

On our way to Indianapolis, we listened to the radio to see if the Indy 500 was going to cause traffic problems for us either getting into town or out of town. It was delayed by rain, which was just perfect as it kept everybody at the stadium rather than on the roads! There was very light traffic as we drove into town and parked at the historical pumphouse, which is now part of the White River State Park in the center of the city. The first part of the walk was across the river on pedestrian bridge and then along the river, past the zoo, and back to a walk built along an old canal. This part of the walk was quite beautiful and had many “Kodak moments”. At every turn we had great views of the river, the city skyline, and the complex of old industrial buildings that have been converted to museums and so forth. The walk beside the old canal reminded us of the Riverwalk in San Antonio, but more open and much less commercialized. As we were walking along, we suddenly heard a dull roar from the North and finally figured out that we were hearing the race cars starting the Indy 500. Despite being several miles away, the low background roar followed us for the entire walk.

After the canal, the second part of the walk looped through the downtown area past the Statehouse and out to a historic neighborhood where James Whitcomb Riley had lived. That neighborhood had all beautifully restored homes, brick sidewalks, and a cobblestone street. We went back past the Hoosier Dome, and saw an open Subway restaurant. Breakfast being “but a memory” by this time (as my Mom used to say), we eagerly went in, hoping to rest our weary legs and stoke up on calories. But our hopes were cruelly dashed. The lights were on, the food was sitting there, but we couldn’t raise a soul to make us a sandwich despite hallooing repeatedly. I figure he was in the back room watching the Indy 500 and either couldn’t believe someone was out walking while the race was on or just didn’t want to be bothered. The store had some of those really big, yummy (high fat) chocolate chip cookies on a shelf I could easily reach and I briefly considered just grabbing one, putting down a couple of bucks, and leaving, but the possible headlines of “Virginia Professor Nabbed in Great Cookie Heist!” deterred me.

Very disappointed, we finally gave up and hungrily trudged the final blocks back to the car. But when we got there, I retrieved the boxes of (low-fat) cookies that we had in the trunk and we each had a few handfuls before starting our drive to Champaign-Urbana. Since the race was still going strong (about lap 100), getting out of Dodge was a breeze. The drive to the Hampton Inn in Urbana was quick with very light traffic for most of the way. We used our cell phone (for the second time this year) to warn Martin of our estimated time or arrival.

When we arrived we checked in and called Martin to come over to the hotel. Afterwards we all went out to dinner in a nice Italian restaurant in Champaign. The food took a long time to come, but we had nice conversation with Martin so we didn’t mind. Fortunately, the food was good and well worth the wait. Martin had tortellini, Monika had manicotti, and I had grilled chicken breast. I know all our entrees were good because I sampled them all!

Martin told us about his research, but it is always questionable exactly how much of that we understand. He explains thoroughly and I think I follow him, but then he’ll say something that makes me unsure. Possibly that is because my background in particle physics is so weak—I got left behind when they started proliferating the many different kinds of quarks to add to the leptons, hadrons, and so forth that they already had. Since dinner lasted until after 8, we were just too tired to go see our grand-kitties that evening and instead turned in early back at the hotel.

Monday 5/29/00
The continental breakfast at the Hampton Inn was more breakfast than continental. There are a lot of low-fat options including skim milk and cereal, bagels, toaster waffles, and low-fat yogurt, and I sampled all of them. Monika tried the high-fat menu of sausages, cheese omelet, biscuit, and toast. Sometimes I feel like Jack Sprat and his wife. We may not have licked the platter clean, but together we did make a good dent in the breakfast bar!

We drove over to Martin’s place on Fletcher Street shortly after 9, and he had breakfast while we played with (and videotaped) the kitties. Cactus was, true to her namesake, slightly prickly and stand-offish—she could tolerate only so much petting and then let you know she had enough. Penny, the calico female, was quite the opposite—a little love bug who never really seemed to reach a saturation point for being stroked, petted, or played with. She occasionally resisted our attempts to hold her in our laps, but she was always polite about jumping away without biting or scratching. So we all had fun, although I think Cactus was not sorry to see us leave around 10.

The drive to Springfield on Interstate 72 was quick, flat, and boring, so it gave us a lot of time to talk to Martin. He seemed to be doing well and was on track to take preliminary orals on his dissertation area next year and finish in about 2 years. We chatted about his old girlfriend, Kristina, who had just graduated from Rice and was off to Italy to live and work. It sounded like quite an adventure to me, the type of thing you typically do when you’re quite young or quite old, if you’re going to do it at all. Kristina was quite young and looking forward, I’m sure, to the exciting differences of Italian culture.

We (more on the quite old side) planned a somewhat similar type of adventure, but without the work!! We talked with Martin about our plans to retire to Germany for a year or more sometime in the future. For Monika it would be a return to her native culture and a reconnection with her roots, but for me it would be a similar kind of cross-cultural adventure in living. Fortunately, I like German culture and all of Monika’s German relatives, so I’m looking forward to it too.

The Volksmarch in Springfield started at an old hotel and headed due West to the cemetery which had Abraham Lincoln’s tomb. The cemetery was quite nice and the tomb plain and simple inside, but quite moving. Almost all of Lincoln’s family was buried in the tomb, and the guide told us that the Lincoln family line had finally died out in 1985. Martin and I read the excerpts from his speeches on the wall, and Martin remarked how the tone of the speeches differed so much from modern politicians. Lincoln’s speeches were far more humble and less self-aggrandizing in tone, as well as being sincerely religious and heartfelt. He sure could turn a phrase.

The trail circled back from the cemetery through town to the Capital area. The modern Capital building is large, ornate, and impressive. The walls were mostly of some kind of sandstone or limestone with a light yellow cast, which I thought was quite pretty. Walking around 3 sides of the Capital gave us several good views of it. The decorations looked somewhat Victorian, and the overall impression was grandiose. In contrast, the old Capital building that we passed later on the walk was much smaller and simpler, in keeping with a smaller and simpler time, perhaps.

The statues in front of the Capitol building were an odd lot. The Lincoln statue was quite appropriate and nicely situated, but the Dirksen statue was really giving undue credit to an old drunk who stayed in office long past his prime. His statue had both the elephant and the donkey as symbols of both parties, but I remember him as a fiercely partisan Republican rather than as a mediator between the parties. A third statue in front of the Capital had an Indian on it and was interesting, but was dedicated to a person I had never heard of despite taking Illinois history. Moreover, I was both disappointed and offended to see that they had put a small, ugly statue of Martin Luther King across the street on the corner, as if by an afterthought. He deserves better than that, and was certainly more of a progressive statesman than Dirksen.

Our last major stop on the walk was Lincoln’s home and the surrounding area, which has all been preserved in an 1860s style. The streets are cobblestone, the sidewalks are boardwalks, and the fences are all white picket fences. Several houses from the period besides Lincoln’s home have been preserved in this area, which really gives it the ambience of a different time and place. This was rather a jolt after walking for an hour through modern city streets in the state capital, but was a very pleasant change of pace.

We made the mistake of making a pit stop at the U.S. Park Service visitor’s center, which cost us $60! I saw an authentic re-creation of a combination compass and sundial in the museum store which I just couldn’t resist. Just think, no batteries to wear out, two moving parts (the compass needle and the folding sundial gnomon), and solar-powered! So I hinted broadly that many if not most fathers would appreciate such a thing on Father’s Day, which was coming up soon. While Monika was purchasing that I found a 3-CD set of Civil War songs which was also irresistible, and a couple of nice hatpins. It’s a good thing that everyone was ready to go and I didn’t have time to look through the book collection!

The return to the start/finish went through a small city plaza with a picturesque fountain and pool with a bridge over it, lacking only water to complete the effect. Since it was Memorial Day, there was no traffic and we would walk down the city streets with impunity. It didn’t take very long to return to the start/finish, after which Martin drove us back to Champaign-Urbana and we had dinner at his place, which he cooked. After dinner we watched the video of Sarah and Judson’s wedding, which was really interesting even though we had seen it before, and in fact had been there and done that! But this way Martin could see how well he made the wedding toast and how his father could make a fool of himself. But it was fun and the cats seemed to like it.

Tuesday, May 30, 2000
Today we let Martin get some work done so that he could drive up with us and show us the Argonne beam tomorrow. We arranged our schedule to take the Champaign Volksmarch in the morning, meet Martin for lunch, visit our old haunts in the afternoon, and meet Martin again for dinner. On the drive over to Champaign, we talked about where we had purchased our 10-speed bicycles in 1973—I thought it was at the bike shop in campustown while Monika thought it was at a shop on the West side of Champaign. It turned out that the Volksmarch would decide who was right.

The Volksmarch started at “Grandy’s” restaurant, which looked like a knock-off of Hardee’s. The route consisted of a quick jog over to a Kaufman Lake Park where we walked North along the shore of a small lake. The trail snaked under the railroad track to the next park in the string, which was Heritage Park. The trestle with the train track was only about 7 feet in height, just high enough that I didn’t have to bend over, but I could just imagine how loud it would be to be under that trestle when a freight train was passing over! As we walked underneath I was hoping for a train so that I could get a really impressive picture of a train bearing almost straight down on me, but no such luck.

Heritage park was a linear, streamside park heading further North. We turned East on Bradley over to Mattis where we turned North to the entrance to Parkside Campus. We didn’t do a circuit through the campus, however, although I would have been interested to see how it had grown in 30 years. Instead, we branched off the entrance road to a curious monument to Illinois Olympians. It appeared to be a 20-foot high open doorway out of white marble, very simple and elegant. Inside the doorway, the floor was tiled with the names, dates, and symbols representing the sports of the Olympians from the state of Illinois. The checkpoint instructions were to write down one of these, and we both agreed on Bonny Blair, who was a really dominant speed skater in the 1980s, dedicated and really, really good.

From the monument we turned South through the campus and back through Heritage Park. At Kaufman Lake Park, we took an alternate path along the West side of the Lake (closer to the train tracks). As we came to the end on the park, I saw an old, horse-drawn, steel-wheeled hay-mowing machine. It was just sitting there, partly overgrown with weeds but in perfect shape as far as I could tell. You just never know what you find on a Volksmarch!

We turned due West (midwestern Volksmarches make heavy use of the North, East, South, and West directions) to walk to the next major road that crossed over the railroad tracks to head South. The route immediately turned back to the East on O’Malley’s Alley, which really rolls off the tongue. I didn’t find out the source of that name, but there had to be a story there somewhere! The route followed an old inter-urban trolley bed, and I wondered how far that old trolley line had proceeded into Urbana and what had ultimately happened to it. From O’Malley’s Alley we jogged over to the final park in the series. We walked down one side and crossed over just North of the petting zoo area—if we had grandchildren we would have definitely detoured to the petting zoo with them but that will have to wait a bit.

We walked back North past a middle school and a high school, and we noticed the students were all very happy. A passer-by informed us that it was the last day of school! No wonder! We curled around the High School turned right on a small street past a seedy looking deli that had a group of 3 girls and another group of 3 boys come out of it, none of whom were holding any drinks, food, or containers of any kind. This plus the curiously defensive behavior of the students raised the issue in my mind of exactly what the deli was selling.

Beyond the deli we suddenly encountered a bicycle shop with a familiar logo on the front. Indeed, we were passing by the Champaign Cycle shop where we had purchased our Azuki bicycles in 1973. I couldn’t resist going in and talking to the manager, who was a local person and knew the history of the shop since it opened in 1969. We had a nice chat about the changes in Champaign-Urbana over the years—the shop had expanded in the back part but the front was the same as it was way back then. I told him we still used the bikes and then we finally took our leave. We were just around the corner from the start/finish point, so we hopped back into the car and drove back to the hotel.

After the lunch with Martin at Fazolli’s, we let him get back to work while we hit the old haunts. The fist stop was the Post Office, where Monika bought stamps and I purchased some Bugs Bunny trinkets on impulse. We couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes total, but when I got back to the car I found a parking ticket courtesy of Urbana’s Finest. Who say’s you can’t go home again? But they sure can give you a parking ticket if you try! They were still using the trick of doubling the fines if you didn’t pay in 72 hours, which was a dodge that directly affected the students because many of us would only use the car on the weekends, so the 72-hour limit would already be expired,

The other dodge the City of Urbana used was to charge personal property tax to all the students in the dorms who didn’t live in the area long enough to register to vote in the November elections. That was my first brush with the principle of taxation without representation, or, as it is known in some circles, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that other fellow behind the tree!” (Wilbur Mills quote, I think). It was nice to have some of the not-so-fond memories triggered to counteract my more maudlin tendencies. The other cue was the plethora of fraternity and sorority houses on campus, which reminded me of the distinctly 2-class society of the university students with the associated snobbishness, cliques, drinking, cheating, and carousing. I may sound a little bitter here, but I clearly remember how the residents of one fraternity smashed the windows of my first car, which would have cost so much to replace that I had to junk it. For them it was a prank, for me the loss of my transportation.

Either fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, Urbana seems to be economically moribund. . There is no development on the outskirts like there was over on the East side of Champaign. Urbana has a history of antipathy to industry starting with the arrival of the railroad sometime before 1860—the town fathers refused to have the noisy, dirty railroad enter their town so the Illinois Central built the line 5 miles to the West, which founded the town of Champaign. For about 150 years Urbana has remained residential while Champaign has attracted industry.

The central area of Urbana currently has a few restaurants and many legal offices, but otherwise a scattering of vacant storefronts and nothing else to attract people. Some things that you might have expected to change in the last 30 years had not changed at all. The local Busey Bank, for example, had avoided the wave of mergers in the banking industry and was apparently still a small town bank. The Jolly Roger Restaurant, a fancy place with windows modeled very roughly on the stern gallery of an old sailing ship (you would have to see it to believe it) was still “Hidden in downtown Urbana” as their adds had said 30 years ago. The county courthouse was still there and created the legal business while the Post Office created the parking ticket business.

But other things had changed a great deal. Lincoln Mall is in the center of Urbana and could be a major attraction, but over half of the store fronts in the Lincoln Mall were empty. Most of the stores that were nominally open had no customers and no sales persons in evidence—very eerie. The mall is essentially dead—the proprietor of the Hallmark store said that the owners were keeping it going as a tax dodge but no new stores had located there in several years. But a couple of store were open, so I did my bit to help Urbana revive. I found a chipmunk hand puppet at a toy store that fit my hand well. Since he (the chipmunk) really liked Monika and tried to be friends with her, I decided he could come home with us. After searching for and finding the salesperson, I bought him. We also found two stainless steel cups at a house wares store.

Continuing on our nostalgia tour, I drove to Babcock Hall, where I spent my freshman year in room 123. We took some nice pictures outside about where my room was, but it was locked and I couldn’t go inside to be sure I had the right one. We drove by the old Lutheran student center (hard by the Catholics, of course), and remembered “Preach”, who was old at the time and must by now be retired. We also passed the Psychology Building and the graduate student dorm (Sherman Hall) where Monika lived for a year and a half (very small rooms to hold two people!). The old Baptist Student Center on Green Street where I stayed my sophomore and junior years had been sold and the front part converted into a store selling sundries whilst the dormitory wing was either apartments or offices.

We tried to find Terry’s old house and the garage where he lived the year we overlapped at U. of I. (“Le Pad” I think he called it). We drove along Healy Street from the engineering campus to the park at the other end, but only one house was left standing on the North side of the street, and it didn’t have a garage and driveway on the right side. All the other houses had been replaced with 2-3 story apartments, condominiums, and so forth.

We ended the tour at 1012 ½ West Main Street, where we lived my senior year. It was a narrow but solid 3-story, 6-flat apartment building that, being brick, had not aged on the exterior at all. The walls on the inside were just as paper thin as I remembered them and our footsteps resounded from the floors. Hopefully we didn’t scare the residents by stopping outside the door to our old apartment to take a picture, because they surely must have heard us tramping around. The only changes we could detect were fire doors in the middle of each floor and a bicycle rack in the paved-over patch of a back yard which served as the building’s parking lot.

After our trip down nostalgia lane, we went out to dinner with Martin at The Round Barn, which he said was a university tradition, although possibly a tradition that had started after our time and in any case would have been a tradition that exceeded our pocketbooks at that time. We were quite early, so we were almost their only customers and had quick service. The food was excellent and we enjoyed talking with Martin, but having TV screens hanging at various points on the ceiling I found distracting, particularly when they displayed lively sports scenes. We went shopping after dinner and bought the bare necessities at Wal-Mart, to which I added videotapes of “Ghostbusters” and “Men in Black”. Buying good cheap ones like these $6.50 tapes is important for keeping me sane (or as sane as I get).--I view a tape every 2-3 days while walking on the treadmill, and without the tapes the boredom of the exercise would drive me bonkers in short order. Volksmarching on the weekends also is part of my sanity plan as it replaces the treadmill exercise for those days.

But dagnab it and consarn it, I found out that evening I was sunburned. Ouch! All of a sudden I noticed my arms and neck were red (insert your favorite redneck joke here). It happens the same way every time. We walk in bright sunlight with a cold breeze, and neither of us even thinks about using the sunscreen until we are already turning red, at which point it is too late. Sigh. The hand lotion provided by the Hampton Inn did, fortunately, work pretty well in soothing the pain and dryness of the sunburn, so we did get to sleep.

Wednesday, May 31, 2000
We met up with Martin shortly after 9 and drove to Argonne National Laboratory just southwest of Chicago. He showed us the ring of the Advanced Photon Source, which despite its name is producing X-rays that he is using in his research. The interior of this facility had a huge (approximately 1 mile around) ring for whipping the photons up to speed and supplying them to research experiments on the periphery. There are many different stations around the perimeter of the ring for experiments in different fields. Martin is using the physics station but other disciplines also have beam access lines for their stuff. Unlike the old-fashioned, atom smasher, the photons keep circling unless they are siphoned off on a tangent to act in one of the experiments. I was disappointed that nothing actually smashed into anything else—the old atom smashers seemed to be an exciting, high-tech version of demolition derby.

Argonne also has many other buildings devoted to research in different scientific disciplines, and the entire campus was quite impressive. We also saw the albino deer that are found only there and have the run of the place—to me they were surprisingly ugly, perhaps because they just didn’t seem to be the right color for a deer. After turning in our dosimeters (I did’t ask how you could get high doses of X-rays and they didn’t tell), we hopped in the car and turned East on 111th Street to drive to Phyllis and Bill’s place. For this leg of the trip, I drove the Buick while Monika rode with Martin—for the first leg I got to ride with Martin because I won the coffee-lid toss by calling “heads” when Martin flipped it. He flipped the coffee lid because he was reluctant to choose one parent over the other (smart kid) and thought that this was the fairest way to determine it.

I managed to get to Phyllis and Bill’s house by 2 p.m. despite having the road blocked by side-by-side garbage trucks for 10 minutes (what were they practicing? Synchronized dumping?). Monika and Martin got turned around, took a different route, and arrive several minutes earlier (no garbage trucks). Lunch was a nice (low fat) chicken stir-fry and fresh bread. After lunch Martin departed for home while Lois, Merlin, Monika and I visited Mom’s grave. Someone had removed the silk flowers I had put on last fall, but Monika and I put on new ones. Lois had a large pot with live plants that looked very nice on the graves. Merlin remarked on how Mom had lived for 46 years after our father had died, which was a very long time for her but gave us all more time to have her with us. Lois told a story about a woman who she and Mom had visited just once to pick currants. When they met recently, the woman had talked about that visit and inquired about Mom, which brought back all the memories for Lois. I’m glad she has all those memories, because after taking care of Mom for her last 28 years she certainly deserves them.

We split up at the cemetery and Monika and I headed South on Pulaski to route 6 to search for a room for the night, which we found at a Holiday Inn Express (no frills but only 65 bucks, which is pretty good for the Chicago area). We then drove due East on 6 to the Rest Haven home in South Holland to visit Mom Ruth, but stopped for a small dinner in a submarine sandwich shop called "The Submarine Port". This shop had beautiful real flowers crowding the windows to the extent that I had the instantaneous impression of a greenhouse rather than a fast food store. There was a rubber tree plant that had, I kid you not, main branches over 30 feet long. These were carefully suspended from the ceiling every 2 feet by chains and hooks. The owner told us it was about 17 years old, and I could see that this year’s green growth was about 2-3 feet on the tip so that was about right. The lush greenery made for a very comfortable ambiance. I had a 10-inch sub and Monika a smaller one, and they were both excellent with broad, soft bread and tasty meat fillings. Since the price was under 10 dollars for both of us and the service was quick, I had to give this shop a 5-star rating on the Holt Restaurant Guide system.

Our visit to Mom went well, but the dementia ward just always gives me the willies. It is hard to shrug off the possibility of Alzheimer’s or similar dementia happening to us personally, especially as the baserate for the 85+ population is 50%, or so I heard on the radio. Those are not very good odds, and I think having the other folks with dementia is making it harder for Mom to maintain a grip on reality, especially as she has taken no interest in the outside world for the last several years. But we joked with her, told her about the wedding of Judson and Sarah, and then looked through the picture album we had put together from all the amateur pictures we had of the wedding. She seemed to enjoy them a lot and emphatically said at the end, “I want to see it again!”, and I was touched by her interest. We promised we would go through them again the next day and then left to return to the hotel.

June 1, 2000
The sun was finally shining, so we took a detour on our trip over to the nursing home and drove by Mom’s old house on 14421 S. Wallace. It’s just a small old, brown brick house, but I stayed there from age 1 to 9 and have a lot of fond memories of the place. It was good to see it well kept. Some new trees and bushes had been planted and the white picket fence changed to a cyclone chain-link fence, but otherwise it looked much the same. The rear gable window was bricked in with glass blocks. One of my earliest memories is being in the crib inside and listening to the train whistles on summer nights when that window was open. They always blew two long notes, one short, and then one final really long one as they crossed the roads. My nickname for the place was “the brown house” because when I was on a family camping trip with the Winterringers in the Smokey Mountains, I had complained that “I don’t like the kitchen outdoors, I want to go back to the brown house!”, which became a family story that Mom loved to repeat.

The old school on the same block was still in business. It was nice to see the kids playing and laughing outside, just like we did about 45 years ago. It is a curiously small school that, judging from the ages of the children playing, still has only grades 1-3. There are some advantages to having only younger kids in a school. I have fond memories of Miss Cornwallis, my 2nd grade teacher, and also of the other kids. One girl even organized a play marriage one day on the playground, and chose me as the groom! I recall it being a very nice, but probably brief, ceremony, as we had to get back in from recess. I’m not sure we would have done that with older kids around. We took pictures of the old house and school before continuing to the nursing home.

Mom was napping, but I awakened her and popped in the videotape of Sarah and Judson’s wedding, which they had express mailed to me so that she could see it. She was fascinated and kept her attention on it constantly for well over an hour. I could see she was tiring at the end, so we skipped some of the personal well-wishers at the reception and focused on the wedding toasters and the bridal couple’s first dance. I kept up a running commentary for her and the other onlookers on who all was in the pictures and found that I enjoyed watching again although this was my third time. We left Mom to eat her (delayed) breakfast and headed East across the palm of Michigan to Lansing, the state capital.

The start/finish point for the Lansing year-round Volksmarch is the Michiganiana store which sells handicrafts and mementos of the Michigan area. They had what looked like nice things and I would have liked to really examine the collection, but the parking meters outside limited us to 90 minutes so we had to charge off on the walk. The first part of the route was a small loop up past the Capitol Building and past the state library and museum. What I saw of the museum when we stopped for a bathroom break looked mighty interesting, but I kept thinking of the 90 minutes which is a very fast pace for a 10 km walk, and decided we didn’t have the time to stop and look.

Returning to the Capitol, we headed North to start the larger, main loop of the walk. The city was clean and had several very interesting older houses, some of which were unique enough that we took pictures. The northernmost point of the trail was a junction with a river-side walk which we followed back South through the downtown area. The checkpoint was an old mansion with beautiful leaded-glass windows. The windows were refracting the lights from chandeliers inside in a rainbow pattern that was so unusual that I tried to capture it on film.

The river walk was the nicest part of this Volksmarch, and wound around through parks and past old dams, silos, and other buildings associated with Lansing’s history. They had constructed wooden boardwalks just above the surface of the river that we used to pass under the road bridges. Since the day was getting hot, these underpasses were a shady and cool relief. We detoured back on Washington Street to go dump another ½ hour of money into the parking meter and managed to catch it with 2 minutes left!

Hoping that would be enough time, we rejoined the river walk for the last stretch of the main loop to the South. On our way back, I noticed we were running late and forged ahead of Monika to try to get to the car before our time expired. Although the time was up when I returned, we did not, in fact, get a ticket. Nevertheless, there were many interesting things to see on this walk that we had to rush past, so I would recommend that other folks find a parking spot for more than 90 minutes and take their time with this very nice walk!

After the walk we drove on for about an hour and stopped at an exit that offered a Best Western plus an assortment of restaurants. After installing ourselves in the room, we walked around to find a place to eat and settled on the Seros, a family restaurant that seemed to be popular with the locals. It was jam packed, but they had a non-smoking section table for us. The menu was extensive, but had a large selection of Greek specialties, which I dearly love (but seldom eat). Monika had the chicken kabob and I had a Greek Trio which consisted of stuffed grape leaves, spinach pie, and a gyro on pita bread. Rotating among the different flavors of the trio and a piece of chicken kabob was a great taste experience. Both of our meals came with soup, salad, and desert, and the soups were particularly interesting. Monika’s potato soup had a light, whipped consistency that we haven’t seen before. I had a lemon rice soup, which was creamy but nice and tart. After finishing all that food, I could understand why so many of the patrons seemed overweight! After dinner we walked over to a discount store to buy a road map (we left the Rand McNally at Martin’s place), and then returned to the hotel and turned in.

June 2, 2000
Even though the Best Western did not offer a breakfast bar, we still didn’t get away until 8 a.m. Monika drove to Port Huron while I typed on the laptop. The countryside was flat farmland scenery with occasional small towns that is typical of the Midwest. We had a quick breakfast at Bob Evan’s, filled the car with gasoline for the drive across Canada, and drove across the Blue Water Bridge to the Canadian border. There we were sharply questioned by a lady customs official. Although Monika was driving and naturally answered almost all the questions, the official specifically took the trouble to lean over and ask me about possession of firearms and pepper spray. Then she directed us to a holding area (called "secondary", says Monika) where the car was thoroughly searched.

We’re not sure why we have had our car searched the last 2 times we visited Canada. Are we looking suspicious in our old age, something to do with a dastardly dotage? Does our untidy back seat with snacks, water bottles, hiking belts, maps, and luggage look like we are smuggling contraband? Did Monika’s accent touch them off (we had to prove citizenship at the immigration station after the car was searched!)? Was it the pepper spray can on my key chain that they confiscated back in the early 1990s and maybe still had in their computer system? Are 1986 Buicks favored by terrorists this year? I wish we could figure out what we are doing wrong, but in any case they were polite and efficient and we were underway in less than 5 minutes.

We drove the interstate to London, which was a little over a 100 kilometers from the border, but then we veered off on highway 3 across the mid-section of this area between the lakes. We wanted to get a better look at it because we are always on the lookout for nice places to retire, and driving a 2-lane highway through the small towns gives a much better view of what a place is really like. One major advantage to being in Canada is no handguns—we could wander the streets at night without being worried about getting shot. On major disadvantage is the winters, but this area is as far South as Canada gets and should have the winter moderated by the presence of the Great Lakes all around.

We stopped at Aylmer to change money and found the folks to be polite and helpful, even when we made mistakes. The flashing green light means that you have the right-of-way at an intersection. Not knowing this, I interpreted it as a cautionary signal and proceeded very cautiously, but no one honked. The timing of the crossing signals did not coordinate with the green lights in the way we expected, so we walked across an intersection against a no-crossing signal, but again no one said or did anything. We both liked this town, Monika says it was “cute”. The downtown strip was economically vibrant, with about 4 empty shops at the edge of it but otherwise full of businesses doing business, including a bookstore! We parked next to the town library, which was a large sandstone brick building that looked big enough to have a decent selection. In a realtor’s window, I found several modest houses in the area for under 100,000 Canadian, which would be about 70,000 U.S., so housing would be affordable. We did not see a hospital, which would be the only other requirement (plus we would have to figure out how we would fit into Canada’s health care system as foreigners, if that was possible).

We wandered on down 2-lane roads toward Niagara-On-The-Lake, known to the locals as NOTL, and got thoroughly lost. Monika finally pulled over and we had a race to see who could locate us first, she using the maps or me using the Global Positioning Service receiver. It came out to a dead heat as she found the provincial route 48 on a map about the same time the GPS receiver located us and indicated that NOTL was about 12 miles northeast. Since driving maps do not have latitude and longitude markings (aviation maps do), we could not easily correlate the GPS position to a location on the streets of the maps. This GPS has a database of cities and towns, but not streets, so you can get a very good idea of what general direction you should go but not precisely what street to turn on. (Hey, I bought it for blimp navigation, not for driving!) So we proceeded driving to NOTL with me watching the GPS while driving and Monika guiding us with the maps, which worked very well (if not spectacularly safely).

We couldn’t quite drive to our starting point in NOTL because the street was blocked with police cars and fire engines. They were seriously working on a building, so we turned off, parked on a side street, and walked around the block to the starting point. Since we were working with a year-old guide for Canadian Volksmarches, we were glad to find the box where the guide said it would be, and we stamped the books, grabbed the map, and started off on the walk. The downtown area is filled with boutiques, nice restaurants, antique stores, and the like. The selection of shops seemed to cater to tourists much more than the towns we had passed through in the interior of Ontario.

From the Fort George parking lot, we walked down to the marina on the shore of Lake Ontario and then proceeded along the lakefront streets for 2-3 kilometers. We passed through a lakefront park with a very graceful gazebo and a clear view of Fort Niagara over on the American side of the border. Many of the houses that overlooked the lake were, of course, mansions, but there were also more modest appearing houses. For a time the trail paralleled a golf course that was right on the shore overlooking the lake—lots of folks were playing. For this part of the walk we had a brisk breeze off the lake that really kept us cool despite the strong sun.

We turned back toward the town center and saw the typical homes of the local folks on the outskirts of town. All in all, NOTL was a very pretty resort town. Shops are oriented to the tourist but are not tacky, garish, or in bad taste. Several houses in the town center date from the early 1800s. All of the houses are kept in pristine condition and following the English tradition flowers were growing in many of the yards. We finished the walk and bought a book of aerial photographs of the Niagara area from the shop before driving on to find a hotel room.

For a while we thought we were out of luck. We drove South on the main North-South road toward Niagara—no sign of a hotel. We drove West to the interstate and across it until the road changed back to a 2-lane highway—nothing. We drove back East past a large cluster of Wal-Mart and other stores, but still no sign of a motel. In desperation we drove further East to downtown Niagara, wondering if they would still have rooms available after 6 p.m. on a Friday night in a resort town. Fortunately, the Days Inn had 1 non-smoking room left with a double bed, so we took it, pitched our gear into it, and walked down Clifton Hill to find a place to eat.

I was overcome by the Clifton Hill area, which for some reason we had not seen on our previous visits to Niagara. It was very strongly oriented to the tourist trade, but of the lowest common denominator. The collection of shops was generally tacky, garish, or in bad taste, and very often all three at once. There were at least 5 haunted houses, 2 Ripley’s shows, 3 wax museums, multiple souvenir shops all selling the same things, and the bargain basement T-shirt shops. I particularly disliked the shills that restaurants and amusement houses had outside their doors trying to lure people in—I’ve seen that for nightclubs and whorehouses before, but never restaurants. Do they really lure people in? My reaction is to run, not walk, in the other direction, and it really is unpleasant to be accosted in this manner.

We settled on Wendy’s for dinner and afterwards found the starting point for the Niagara Falls walk that we wanted to take the next day. Seeing the sun hitting the falls, we rushed back to our room to get our cameras and jackets (it was getting cold!), and returned to take several nice pictures of the falls including a rainbow over the American falls. We went on a wild goose chase (literally); that is, we searched through all the souvenir shops to find companions for the carved Canadian goose that we had purchased in Prince Edward Island in 1995, but to no avail. But the chase took us through the Secret Garden area next to the Niagara River, which was very nicely done.

June 3, 2000
As we had hoped, the day dawned bright and cool, but no rain, for our Volksmarch, so I wore long pants and my red “Northern Virginia Volksmarchers” T shirt. We walked a block to the start/finish point, which is now a Comfort Inn. I asked twice at the desk for the “volksmarch box” and the girl just said “What?” Finally she said, “Oh, I know what box you want; that’s the box that I never understand when people ask me for it!” It must have been my Virginia accent! She retrieved the box from the storeroom in back of the front desk and we filled out the waiver and took 2 sets of instructions. It was very early in the day, 6:30 a.m., so all the teenagers were asleep—you could have rolled a bowling ball down any of the streets and not hit anyone. Only we and some other old fogies were looking for an early breakfast at the Golden Griddle next door to the motel, which advertised a 6:30 opening. We had a high carbohydrate, high sugar breakfast, French toast for Monika and blueberry pancakes for me, and started walking at 7 a.m.

The walk went South through a chain of parks starting with the Queen Victoria park that lie across the road from the river-side walk. The Queen Victoria park had very nice flower gardens, and the irises and azaleas were blooming. The roses were not yet blooming, which was a shame because the centerpiece of the floral design was a set of rosebushes. The other parks were also very pretty and well kept. Almost no one aside from maintenance workers was around, so it was very peaceful. We kept looking for the greenhouse, which was our first checkpoint, but it was a lot farther than the map had led us to believe. After a false alarm at the Canadian hydroelectric plant, we found the greenhouse further on. Of course it was still closed, so we guessed that they had “tropical” birds because that was stated on an outside door. I think it also had butterflies and would like to go back and see the inside some time.

The southern turnaround for the 10 km option was a park on Duffin Island. The 15 km option extends further South and also includes a circuit of Goat Island between the American and Canadian falls. The directions seemed to imply that we should make a circuit of the island, and it was well worth it. We started the circuit where the sign marked a nature trail, and the first part was through natural wetlands with lots of ducks. For the second part, we went island hopping across bridges between small man-made islands. This was lots of fun and led us past a pool area that could have been for flood control or perhaps a very old swimming facility. We were a little turned around at the end, but found our way back by simply listening for the roar of the falls and orienting ourselves to that.

The return route led us right beside the river back past the old power station, the new power station, the Canadian falls, and the American falls. The old power station is interesting because it is a large, magnificent building that is not being used at present. It was built of large stone blocks with Greek architecture, tall columns, and semi-circular areas at each end. I felt that it really should be converted to some appropriate use like a museum or a set of art galleries or something similar. In contrast, the new power station, while very functional, looked like just any old industrial building.

While approaching the falls, we could see the plume of mist rising above the Canadian falls, which are shaped like a horseshoe, and we were sprayed as we crossed under the plume. Watching the water flow over the falls was as hypnotizing as I remembered it. I cannot imagine the awful suspense of some one going over the falls in a barrel—I know I wouldn’t. The views were spectacular and we stopped to take pictures pretty much at every lookout. The only other people out by this time were the Japanese tourists, who were busy taking pictures just like we were. Taking our time, we walked all the way to the Rainbow Bridge where we were allowed to cross the bridge for 50 cents each. At the midpoint they had the flags of the U.S., Canada, and the United Nations marking the international boundary. We took our final pictures and returned to the Canadian side, hoping they would let us in without problems, which they did.

The final part of the walk returned to Clifton Hill via the Secret Garden, which has pools and a rock garden that simulates a Japanese-style garden in my mind. The bridge over the terraced pools was particularly nice, and many of the flowers were already blooming. We walked back up Clifton Hill past the tacky tourist trap area, which was starting to come to life. The Frankenstein Haunted House was starting to roar and some of the sidewalk shills were already out. At the start/finish point we stamped our books and decided to buy 2 of the “B” awards since they didn’t offer an “A” award this year.

Back at the hotel we folded our tents and stole away quietly, although I was strongly considering taking revenge on the late night revelers by singing a rousing rendition of “Dixie”, “Good Morning”, or some other loud and cheerful tune. But we were good and drove off to try to drive to the bridge that we had just walked across. We had a devil of a time finding the entrance to it. This was the second time that we had gotten lost in Canada. Either the Canadians don’t mark their highways well, or they mark them in some manner that we cannot detect (like the fire hydrants in Germany, but that’s another story). Getting through American immigration and customs was remarkably painless compared to our entrance to Canada. Of course, Monika holding her U.S. Customs ID along with her passport might have helped a bunch.

From Niagara, N.Y., we had decided to take 2-lane roads that went more or less straight South through New York and Pennsylvania. The route had very light traffic and was very scenic, as we had hoped. Except for a 50-mile stretch that Monika drove (she chose the short straw), most of the 2-lane was relatively easy to drive. Calamity Jane (the Buick), of course, continued to have the squealing noise from the right front wheel that I heard grow steadily worse the day before. I tentatively diagnosed it as just a brake wear indicator (which turned out to be correct) and fervently hoped that it was not a wheel bearing or U-joint going bad. So we went very light on the brakes for the drive home, but had to use them sometimes on those twisty, 2-lane, up-and-down roads. Fortunately everything held together well enough to get us home.