Nobody expects....Misssterrrrrrr CHEESE!!!! Cleveland, Ithaca, and Chicago: Day Eleven

Ok! Today was the day we left Ithaca. We woke up relatively early, I think at about 7 I was awake, and by 8 we got the kids up. We wanted to make sure that everybody was packed, everybody had eaten breakfast, everybody was showered and ready to be in the car for ten hours. We had accumulated a fair amount of stuff in Ithaca...Rhyann and I went a little wild at the thrift stores, though not nearly as wild as I COULD have gone, and my dad would have been happy to buy more stuff for Rhyann and Alex when we went thrifting, but Rhyann felt guilty accepting that offer, and Alex wasn't terribly thrilled about being out and thrifting. She and my dad had that in common. The point being, when we left, we had our suitcases stuffing the back up. Now, we had suitcases, a fucking full sized lamp, a shit ton of beer, clothes, yarns, liquors, foods. Our poor kids were jammed into the back while Derek and I got to be nice and roomy in the front but that's the luxury of being an adult on a family road trip!!

It took us maybe two hours to get everything Tetris'ed into the back seat and the travel tent on top of the car. Derek says that's called a car topper, but I think travel tent works. Once we were all loaded up, we said our goodbyes, and off we headed!

Obligatory morning photos of my children, bright eyed and bushy tailed for a day on the road!

I'm so happy to road trip with  my babies. Love this for me. 

We came across this sign, and I had never seen one like it, and I laughed so hard about it that Derek turned around so I could get a photo of it. It means there's an information center nearby, but I thought it was advertising a mystery or a puzzle or something. I was really fucking amused. 

The drive was fairly uneventful. The kids listened to their stuff, Derek and I listened to ours and chatted intermittently, and about nine hours later, there it was! The Chicago skyline, in all of its hazy, misty glory:

THE SKYWAY!!!! Which is a terrifying free for all of speeding monsters that are too self important to be considerate drivers, but it meant we were officially in the Chicago area. 

Hello, Chicago! We are in you! Obviously I was obliged to play Mercy Me by Alkaline Trio, I play it every time I go to Chicago. 

We had made lunches for everybody to eat on the road, because stopping for food can be a hassle. I have dietary restrictions and I don't eat meat, and the kids have their own preferences that can be hard to make work in one place. So packing lunches made the most sense. But Derek and I knew immediately what we wanted to eat for dinner:

NEPAL HOUSE. Our favorite Nepalese place in America (so far). We found it the last time we were both in Chicago, and it sucks that we found it our last night there, because we only got to eat there once together. But now it's a staple anytime either of us are in Chicago. This was the first time Derek and I had been in Chicago together since 2017, I think. But Nepal House for the first night there was a no brainer. 

But not for me. I was craving Veggie House, a vegan Chinese place I discovered the last time I was in Chicago. I crave it all the time. And I literally ate it every single night we were in Chicago. This photo doesn't look like much, but trust me when I say that this fried egg tofu with stir fried green beans hits the fucking spot. 

When Derek and I booked this trip, we had initially booked a very nice hotel room on Magnificent Mile. The kids would have had to share a bed, and Derek thought that was fine, all kids have to do that. But I thought it might be nice for all of us to have our own space. So we pared down the hotel, and because we stayed so far out of Chicago proper, we ended up saving money even though we booked two rooms instead of one. In hindsight, we should have just...kept the nice room on Magnificent Mile and  been vaguely cramped for three nights. Our hotel was YUCKY:

I took several videos of our room. The bathtub was full of pubes, the toilet was dirty, the sheets weren't clean. And it wasn't just our room. The room the kids stayed in was similarly disgusting. Rhyann took videos of their room, too. Derek and Alex aren't fussy, but Rhyann and I felt gross about sleeping on the nasty sheets. I took a video showing them how to make makeshift pillowcases, and I slept on a makeshift pillowcase myself. 

But it served its purpose. Derek and I like to stay in nice places, sure, but we are also of the mind that it doesn't really matter, because we're not going to a place to spend time in the hotel room (our honeymoon being the exception), we're going to a place to explore and adventure. This is the first hotel that has really tested our resolve, because we usually go between cheap and knowingly awful and expensive and quite comfortable. We tend to go midgrade, which is what we thought we did here, but turns out no. We got cheap and gross and fucking awful. But we're all no worse for the experience, we did end up being out of the hotel more than in it, so no biggie. 

The only issue was Alex and Rhyann having to work out the newness of their sibling bond. I think that a lot of Alex's ND behaviors read to Rhyann as intentionally rude when really, Alex is just...being her ND self. That being said, Alex can also just be kind of...rude. It's hard to say what was going on those nights, but they seemed to be fine enough, though I think Rhyann was upset and kind of put out. I can't blame them, it can be a lot to manage a navigating a new sibling that is also autistic when you yourself may be autistic and you both have very specific needs and expectations. I think they both just need space, so for our big trip in 2024 (we're taking a 15 day trip through the middle of America with my dad and Caryn and maybe Laurel, if she's game), Derek has been chatting a lot about an RV. Which would be fun and wonderful...but I do not think it's logistically sound. I think all of us need separate spaces to detox in, family can be a lot. It's a year away, but I think we need to start planning for it now that 2023 is just about here, because Yellowstone reservations fill up FAST, and we want to get a place that works for all of us. I'm hoping we can start the planning when my dad and Caryn arrive here in May of 2023.

Anyway. After we were all sufficiently grossed out by our hotel rooms, we hunkered down and got ready for the next two whirlwind days: museums, museums, museums.