Roadtrip: Brooke & Joel
This summer, much of our travel will be due to wedding-related events. In all, we hope to attend five ceremonies during these sweltering dog days of July, August, and September around the upper Midwest.
This weekend, Joel, Adelaide, and I had the pleasure of gathering together with friends at the wedding celebrations of two Luther chums, Brooke and Joel.
Friday afternoon, following a tediously informative day of student orientation at the hospital for our young hero, we loaded up our family sedan with our Sunday Best, a cooler full of Limonata and hard-boiled eggs, and our raspberry-proficient little girl, and were off on the first five-hour leg of our weekend trip that took us to a Holiday Inn in Rochester, Minnesota.
The next morning, refreshed from a goodnight’s sleep, we marched out of our hotel room at around 9AM, and continued our hike, crossing Wisconsin, using I-90. Somewhere near the attractive waterslides and riverboats of the Wisconsin Dells (nearly four hours later), the Taurus began to ever so gently complain about the temperature and humidity by subtly pointing out that the engine heat was rising. To soothe the car’s under-hood heat, I cranked up the heater – yes, the heater – and we rolled along with all four windows down under the scorching midday sun. Around that same time, I asked Joel – who was riding in the backseat with Adelaide and keeping our spirits afloat with some trashy historical fiction – “Honey, what time does the invitation say we need to be at the wedding?” After some shuffling around, Joel announced, “Three thirty.” The dashboard clock read 12:41, and we were still sweaty two hours away from our destination.
We made good time despite our crankiness, the heat, and our troubled Taurus to Beloit, Wisconsin – a charming river town on the border between Wisconsin and Illinois – at two o’ clock, promptly fed Adelaide, showered, and dressed and arrived at the church twenty minutes before the start of the ceremony. Our interstate stress was quickly replaced by a bout of stage anxiety, as Joel and I were scheduled to perform a dramatic recitation from A.S. Byatt’s Possession. Several friends greeted our arrival at the church with, “Did you bring your script?” Before leaving Vermillion an odd moment of foresight prompted me to grab a copy of the novel and throw it in the car, so we came prepared. Whew!
The wedding was beautiful. Adelaide charmed many of our college friends with her clever toes and bright eyes. We toasted and danced and laughed and cheered before we three turned into pumpkins at eleven o’ clock and stretched out in the massive king-sized bed in our air-conditioned hotel room.
The next morning (yesterday), we were back on the road toward hearth and home. After ten long hours of driving – with frequent stops to feed Adelaide and the engine with their own preferred forms of coolant – we rolled into Vermillion. The trip was over in the blink of an eye, but all in all, it’s good to be home again.