Day 8: Indiana and Michigan

Greetings from South Bend, Indiana!

Today we did laundry. Road Trip Rule Number 3: Allow half a day in your itinerary for laundry. This is not a really fun activity at home, but being on the road makes it a gruesome ordeal-especially when you have entered yet another time zone and lost yet another hour. We realized that we had not brought a second laundry bag, so we really didn't have any way of inconspiculously getting the laundry back into the hotel. This was not an issue of modesty, it was an issue of "there is a great big honking wedding going on at our hotel" I just knew that we would pull up with loads of folded clothes when the bride and groom arrived. Oh, how am I so psychic? So, some young blushing bride is going to get back wedding pictures of herself folded in the arms of her new husband with John and I in the background, our arms stacked with folded laundry.

Now we were on our way to Niles, Michigan for dinner with John's Uncle Tom and his wife Doris.

Tom and Doris are delightful. Tom opened the door to John and said, "You got old." They both have great senses of humor, loved telling stories on John and the whole Kennedy clan, including themselves. They also love to drink martinis, which is what they call a tumbler of gin with an olive. I soon discovered that a gin and tonic was a tumbler of gin with a floater of tonic. It was getting to be more fun by the minute.

One of our purposes on this trip had been to go see the farrmhouse that John's greatgrandfather and assorted ancestors (believe me it's a long story) built on the shores of Lake Barron around 1830. The modern addition -a kitchen for instance- was added in 1900. The bad news was that, unfortunately, the upkeep had gotten to be too much and the house had been torn down: Uncle Tom had video taped the demolition, so I got to see a little of the house from the tape. After Doris and Tom fed us dinner-heaven to have a wonderrful home-cooked meal, Tom, John, and I went out to the site of the farmhouse where an annual reunion of assorted and sundry Kennedy cousins of one degree or another was underway. All of these Kennedys camping out on the site of the house, frollicking in the lake, water-skiing with their arms in casts (another long story,) eating, and getting ready for an all-night party around a bonfire that included drinking games and tricycle races. The headquarters is a cabana, appropriately named, for this rowdy Kennedy Clan, Hyena's Port. Appropriate and slightly terrifying to an outsider.

So, after meeting, hugging, and swapping stories about the good old days when being towed by a speed boat in a tractor inner-tube, before innertubes with handles, meant that you wrapped your arms through it and usually got gouged in the ribs by the stem, we regretfully said good-bye and hoped that we would soon return for the next reunion week-end.

Tom took us on a short tour of Niles, and then it was time to say good-bye to Doris and Uncle Tom. It was a wonderful, but too short, visit.

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