We're on vacation in southern Indiana. We've been having a lot of fun. The lodge where we've been staying was supposed to have wifi but apparently, "Nah, it broke" and they "thought [they] ordered the part to fix it last week but it hasn't come yet." I'm pretty sure they think the internet works kind of like the fuel injection system of a 1993 Toyota Tercel.

We were thinking about making another trip to New York instead, but the only thing we really wanted to do there was see friends, and we figured this should be a real "family" vacation, you know, where we get really annoyed with each other and eat lots of bad food. Besides, New York costs $12 every ten minutes. In southern Indiana, that's a whole lot of fried biscuits and apple butter. I really do love Indiana. The people here are amazing and there's actually a lot to see and do. And when you live in Detroit, southern Indiana might as well be San Tropez. "Look at all the people walking!" we shout at each other excitedly. "Why aren't any of these buildings broken?" Juniper asks.

So I'll bid adieu from downtown Bloomington, Indiana, where I'm scamming from a hotspot and typing on the roof of our compact sedan in a parking garage while the kids sleep (miraculously) in their car seats. We're heading home soon, so fret not if you're anxiously awaiting my take on my daughter's newfound obsession with toejam. I'm sure you've been fine without it for a few days.

Saturday, August 18, 12:30 a.m.

I am thinking of the first time I had a pint of draft beer. Scruffy Murphy's pub, I think: a pint of Guinness. This was my roommates' local, wedged between a nunnery and a pensioners' apartment building in an alley across from our apartment on Lower Mount Street. I had my third and fourth pint later that night, along with my first glass of Irish whiskey, at a nightclub down the block you entered through the howling mouth of a giant fiberglass wolf. We were the only people there under the age of thirty-five, though as I recall, that did not prevent us from dancing with sloppy-drunk old ladies who smelled of smoke while whispering horrifying things in our ears.

Tonight I am walking the dog up and down Pittsburgh's Southside admiring the crappy little taverns on every corner, half wishing I still had a local where I could get a cold pint. I peer into the glass-bricked facade of Karwoski's gritty pub and then feel grateful for the dog, knowing that if I had no excuse not to go in I might actually do it, order a cold glass of Yuengling and try to make some account of myself to strangers. I keep walking. People who live in these brick rowhouses had fathers who worked in the steel mills, that is, if they're not old enough to have worked there themselves. This is where Wood's father lives, in an old steelworker's house up on the slopes with a million-dollar view of the city that revealed itself only after the mills closed and the smoke clouds drifted away, leaving views in the place of jobs for those who might enjoy them.

I look for a liquor store, but Pennsylvania has some byzantine regulations about selling alcohol that I don't understand; it is damn near impossible to buy a six pack here. I consider that these neighborhoods were built back when the only place to escape the smell of cooling slag and the whining of your seven kids was behind the glass-bricked facade of the corner tavern. And to this day, nearly every corner still has one.

Sunday, August 19, 12:30 a.m.

My stomach contents are a vile slumgullion of grape leaves, McDonalds french fries, ouzo, and wedding-reception flounder. I have returned to the hotel room with Juniper from her first Greek Orthodox Wedding in a small steel town along the Allegheny River. Wood is still off circle dancing. I have been looking forward to this wedding for months, hoping it would be more like The Deer Hunter (before all the Russian roulette) than that other movie about Hellenic nuptials my grandma loved so much. A priest with wacky facial hair shook some smoking bells; crowns were held above the heads of the betrothed like Roman generals in a triumph, everything was spoken in Greek. Instead of reading the Bible, the priest sang it, though it lacked both rhyme and melody. I imagined him ordering Chinese food that way.

It is such a challenge to have something you wish you could change about your kid. You tolerate the late-night feedings and the early mornings and the nap-time tantrums and even the bottled beer because those things only affect you; but it can be so much more trying when the kid makes a public spectacle of her poorer points. Greek Orthodox weddings, perhaps, were not designed with a 2-year old's attention span in mind. The ceiling in the church's balcony was about five and a half feet, so we stooped rather than stood during the entire ceremony. One time I bonked Juniper's head against the ceiling and she started wailing. The priest stopped singing. Everyone turned to look as I rushed her out of the sanctuary. Juniper's stranger anxiety has gotten progressively worse with the diversity of options now available to express her displeasure at being stared at by three-hundred Greeks or stroked by some second cousin or interrogated by a grand aunt. To be honest, I didn't care about the screaming in the church or the rude things that came out of her mouth when someone else's blue-haired yia-yia pinched her cheek. It's the face-burying shyness at her own Pittsburgh grandparents that made us so embarrassed and enraged that we probably deserved the faces from all the onlookers that said, "sheesh, what bad parents."

Upstairs at the reception, all the kids under 13 were locked away under the supervision of a few busty Greek college girls. There was a room full of candy and crayons, bags of french fries and warm bottles of Sunny Delight, and, not surprisingly, dozens of children bouncing off the walls. One kid told me this was "the yelling room" and that he had to go there because he had "the smoke coming out." I brought Juniper to "the quiet room," and we spent some time drawing pictures of Archbishop Demetrios before I tried to return to the company of adults. When I attempted to slink downstairs, I swear she looked up at me and laughed with incredulity before going into hysterics.

Monday, August 20, 12:30 a.m.

Torrential rain, white knuckles, five hours in a car with a wet dog and a crabby 2-year-old. I swear, if there had been a Wal-Mart visible from the Ohio Turnpike, we would now be the proud owners of a portable DVD-player and a Dora-the-Explorer Box Set.

Now we're home, and I've never dreaded a week of stay-at-home fatherhood like this. I used to have Sunday-night nightmares about work: assignments I hadn't completed, angry reproaches from the partners, a meeting with human resources about my internet usage. Tonight I will dream of Aeron chairs and air conditioning, research assignments and bay views from 27 floors above the ground where two-year olds stalk the land.

We've made it to Michigan, but not yet our final destination of Detroit. We spent last night with my parents, who hadn't seen their granddaughter since early March, and tonight we're with Wood's parents. We close on our house tomorrow, and our possessions arrive on a truck next Wednesday. Things could be worse, but they still kind of suck.

I'm feeling a lot of regret about the last part of our trip. We sort of just drove through Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois without stopping, other than to let Juniper stretch her legs in one fast food place or another. We did spend a day in Omaha, Nebraska, which is a beautiful and amazing city. The old train station took my breath away. After Omaha, I'd had every intention to stop at small community diners and see the offbeat stuff along the road that so many readers recommended. I'd also wanted to take I-70 through Kansas and Missouri (we got so many great recommendations for St. Louis), but the extra hours it would have added to our trip made it unfeasible. We were sick of driving, sick of reading terrible books over our shoulders and dealing with the collective constipation that comes from too many fistfuls of pirate's booty and too much fast food. Somewhere in Colorado Juniper decided that this dreadful Thomas the Tank book was her new favorite, and we probably read it to her three dozen times in the last few days to appease her in the back seat. We eventually decided to start using a child molester's voice for Thomas because that sick motherfucking train seemed a little too eager to pick up all those children before the other trains got to take them home. In the end, appeasing Juniper became the theme of this trip. Not crazy roadside attractions in Kansas or determination of the best cinnamon bun on the Platte River. For every adorable moment where we'd point out deer or horses or cows to Juniper and the car would speed by and she'd demand "more mama, more!" there were a dozen stretches of empty highway she filled with unbearable whining and hollering where there was just nothing we could do to stop it.

So we quit looking for cute playgrounds in little towns and started getting excited when we'd see a billboard for a McDonald's playland on I-80. We drove right past towns where readers had recommended awesome sights simply because Juniper was sleeping and we wanted to get as many miles under our belt as possible. When a rainstorm followed us from Denver to Davenport, we stopped only when necessary. We even stopped at a Wal Mart that was right on the highway after we lost Addie #4.

My elitist-asshole attitude towards Wal Mart is no secret, but I had actually never been to one, so I felt a little like one of those dipshits who's never smoked pot yet feels completely comfortable ranting on and on about the dangers of marijuana abuse in this lovely country of ours. So setting foot for the first time in the super Wal Mart of Lexington, Nebraska was kind of like taking a nice long hit on a joint filled with the shit I'd been complaining about for years. I didn't feel anything, really. I was a little creeped out by the park benches scattered about with old men talking to each other on them like they were surrounded by leafy elms and elegant fountains rather than displays of rechargeable batteries and stacks of Scary Movie 4 DVDs. But that feeling of being creeped out was soon overwhelmed by the purple haze of finding 12-packs of soda for $2.50. We walked away with two of those and a new doll for Juniper, and $8 of my money headed to the vault in Arkansas. And I also spent about $4.00 in quarters trying to get one of those Homies on a low-rider bicycle from the toy/candy machines up front. I guess I'm just a hypocrite. This is the face of a baby who realizes for the first time that her dad is a hypocrite:

Several times on this trip I remembered reading that chapter in Charles Kuralt's book about all the dozens of names for burgers he'd encountered in his travels ("You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.") and I felt guilty every time I bit into an In and Out burger or a Wendy's cheeseburger deluxe. We never eat that crap, and I had wanted this trip to be about what makes these small towns along the highway unique, not what made them like every place else.

We drove past dozens and dozens of abandoned restaurants and empty storefronts in small towns across the American west. We sat alongside people who lived and worked in those towns and ate in the fast food joints that dotted the highways that both led people to their towns and drew their young people out and away towards bigger places. I nearly broke down when a guy pushing a mop in a McDonald's somewhere in Iowa came up to Juniper and said she was beautiful and said he had two himself, one only nine months old. And I watched him push his mop and I felt so much sorrow and love for this man in a McDonald's uniform. And I felt so lucky that I didn't have to leave Juniper in her bed to push a mop in a McDonald's in the middle of the night. But mostly I felt love for him, and knew that look in his eye all too well when he saw my daughter shrieking with the joy of freed limbs, pushing her happy meal Hummer along the floor in front of his mop. Thinking about his own. Later I sat in the car and wondered why I had to be such an elitist asshole, why I had to want the people in these towns to want something they clearly don't want. They don't want to stop shopping at Wal Mart. They don't want to stop eating at McDonalds.

This isn't some convenient postmodern epiphany about how great strip malls and big boxes and fast food chains actually are. I still think these chains are lousy places to shop and eat. But that's just one asshole elitist's opinion, and only as valid as the next person's. I have to admit though, that biting into a McDonald's cheeseburger (something I had not done in years) brought back positively Proustian memories of similar childhood bites.

And that was actually kind of nice.

In the grisly, desperate part of today's earliest hours, when only jetlagged expatriate Britons must listen to NPR deep in the middle of Iowa to learn about the latest news in the cricket controversy, I heard a feature about cosmonauts on BBC World News. It seems that the Russians are researching the psychological effects of extreme space travel on the team of cosmonauts who will make the incredibly long and shitty journey to the red planet. Officials in Moscow are turning away volunteers who want to participate in a study being conducted there that would simulate the kinds of conditions faced by those cosmonauts. The officials hope to determine whether five people will be able to spend the necessary years of space travel in close quarters without killing each other. So five volunteers will spend five hundred days in a hermetically sealed five-hundred cubic meter unit while Russian scientists study their interactions. This is not a reality show.

At first, I thought, who are these people, so willing to voluntarily sit in a tiny pod for five hundred days with people they don't know at all? It struck me that they might be folks who just drove across the country with an eighteen-month-old child in the backseat, and are just looking for a way to relax.

As we near the end of our journey, I have this advice to good folks at Roskosmos: be sure to pack plenty of Pirate's Booty.

We got passed by this truck on I-70. Living in San Francisco, we were blissfully unaware of any trend in testicled trucks, and this came as quite a shock. We were stuck behind this guy for a few miles because a semi had overturned ahead of us on a steep grade and traffic had slowed to a crawl, so Dutch and I spent the time speculating whether the dick was supposed to be the truck itself or the guy driving it. Either way, I guess.

Still, the balls on this truck have nothing on the giant balls dangling from the hindquarters of the male elk that was blocking my friend's driveway at midnight when we returned to her cabin in the mountains west of Boulder. She lives with no cell service or internet access, just mountains and giant elk testicles.

Tonight, with any luck: Kansas (and a decent internet connection).

Last night we were driving on a small state road on the outskirts of Grand Junction, Colorado, through a district of polebarns with corrugated steel roofs offering used office furniture and granite countertops starting at $45 per foot, when a SUV drove fast across a dirt lot, stirring up clouds of dust, and I asked Wood what day it was. The 23rd, she said, and as she said it we both realized it was our third wedding anniversary. The sun was already setting, the baby in the backseat wanted us to find a motel "now! please!" and it seemed that in the frenzy of packing and traveling we had forgotten more than just the small gifts we ordinarily exchange: we had forgotten the significance of this date altogether.

So we splurged and got a room in a great hotel. I can't stay in another Motel 6 like the one where we spent the night in Winnemucca. That Motel 6 had a beer bottle opener screwed to the bathroom counter. This was its only amenity. And when Wood wanted to drink her 22-oz bottle or Russian "Ursus" beer, she found it useful. Last night we stayed with the Matics whose hospitality, as I told Stefanie when we parted, was positively Homeric. Remember in the Odyssey, when Telemachus goes to visit Menelaus and Helen, and there is that long description of Menelaus' generous hospitality? Well Menelaus didn't give Telemachus his own king-sized bed. How could we stay in another Motel 6 after staying in a beautiful home filled with toys and boys Juniper loved?

As we reflected on our anniversary that we didn't know was our anniversary, we decided it was still a pretty good day. We saw Mormon ground zero, where we posed Juniper in all kinds of blasphemous spots. We went to Liberty Park's playground, which was the nicest we've ever seen. Juniper then drew with a green marker all over the face of the beautiful little girl who has probably occupied more bandwidth than any other baby in the world (and Leta still shared some of her M&Ms and Wheat Thins). And then we drove across southeastern Utah and its breathtaking scenery. Wood did get a migraine when we hit I-70, but Juniper didn't scream too hard in the hundred miles to Grand Junction. That was a blessing.

In a few minutes we're going to head east towards Denver. Traveling with a toddler truly does suck. But they sleep, and there are a lot of nice people to see along the way.

Turns out there isn't much to do off I-80 in Nevada other than gamble, which I tried. I've never been to Vegas, so the haze of the nickel-slot room at the Red Lion casino in Elko, Nevada was the scene of my first wrestling match with a one-armed bandit. I just don't get it. Maybe it's my cheap-ass Dutchness but I just don't find any entertainment value throwing my money away. Also, my fellow gamblers were as depressing as I'd imagined they would be. I could maybe see the glamour of roulette in Monte Carlo while sipping martinis with tuxedo-clad superspies and their supermodel fucktoys wearing glimmering Versace gowns. Maybe. But sitting next to some long-ashed cigarette smoking pot-bellied octogenarian in an unironic trucker hat drinking a Rolling Rock at ten in the morning while shoving quarters into a talking video poker machine? No wonder Grandma's birthday cards have only had three one-dollar bills in them since they built that Indian casino in the next town.

A lot of the casinos in these Nevada towns have been advertising "penny slots" and I just don't get that either. So even if you win, you get pennies? Thousands of pennies? Isn't that like winning orphans?

We're in Salt Lake City tonight. Juniper is constipated, but enamored with the young gentleman of the excessively hospitable family with whom we're staying, who happens to be only two weeks older than her and poops four times a day. Here's hoping some of that will rub off. Across the street there is a late-night ninja school, and when we drove up there were about twenty people out on the front lawn in ninja outfits practicing various ninja weapons. I nearly crapped my pants with excitement at seeing so many ninjas. Now if someone tells me there is an orphanage full of plucky newsboys down the street, I am totally scrapping all plans for Detroit and staying in Salt Lake City.

Juniper inherited my sense of direction, not her mother's lack of one. For the last month or so, when we're in the car and get within a few blocks of our apartment, from her backwards view of the neighborhood (her tiny body, until now, prevented her from sitting facing forward) and the roofs of the neighboring houses told her she was "home." She said that word clear as anything, and Wood and I always looked at each other, astonished that she knew.

Last night, at around nine, I walked through the bare-walled, emptied apartment we were leaving and I was struck with the memory of seeing it for the first time as an unmarried kid four years ago, and I thought about how much happened in those walls since. "It's just a place," said Wood, when I got in the car, sniffling, after turning the key in the lock for the last time. Juniper was silent in the back, perched facing forward for the first time and sitting between her favorite stuffed animals who were themselves sitting on a mountain of snacks and toys. She had been whining, but somehow the experience of her father crying shocked her enough to stop that. "It's just a place," Wood repeated, "what really matters is here in this car."

I always get this way. When I drove out to California by myself years ago, I had my share of fear and sadness, and crying like a whiny-ass titty baby. I first left Wood living in a dorm in Ann Arbor, and then left my parents' house in Kalamazoo. I hadn't had a real home since Wood and I moved out of the house we'd shared during law school, and for six months before I moved, I drifted from sublet to sublet, from one friend's couch to another for three months. When I crossed into Nevada on my cross-country drive I saw a hand-painted sign twisted into a barbed-wire fence just beyond Wendover that said two words: Go Home. I'm sure its author intended it to be some kind of statement against Mormon or Mexican encroachment but I took it personally. I took it as a sign from god. Go home, it said. The trouble was I didn't have any home to go to.

The next day I walked through a bare apartment that smelled vaguely of cats, the apartment where my unimagined daughter would take her first steps, where she would say her first word, and where over the course of nineteen months would run towards my stooped form to give me ten thousand hugs. I had a feeling about that apartment that first day I saw it. I rented it on the spot. I needed, more than anything, a home.

Leaving San Francisco is another matter. We took Bush Street downtown, to see the tall buildings and lights one last time, and when we reached Bush and Kearny I looked to the left and saw some guy taking a shit and wiping his ass with a rag right under a light in an alley. "God I'm going to miss this fucking town," I said to Wood. Then we got on I-80, and I cried all the way across the Bay Bridge.

We're driving down 80 today, making some reader recommended stops in Nevada City and in the Reno/Tahoe area. I will update with more details of our route and things we saw or did that readers recommended. I'd like to get to Wendover tonight, and to Salt Lake City tomorrow.

Here is the tune we are whistling today: [click here to listen].

Stay tuned for updates from the road.

I've always loved to look at foreign travel guides for the places that I've lived, particularly San Francisco. It's so interesting to see the places that the authors recommend: the sights, the bars, the restaurants. I often wonder what city it is they describe, considering how different the experience they recommend to an average tourist is from my own knowledge of the city. It warms my heart to think of my own naivete in traveling: the difference between the Rome I know and the Rome of someone who lives there. Wood and I once spent a week in her Uncle's empty house in an unremarkable neighborhood of Vienna, and it was so nice to shop at grocery stores where nothing was made convenient for foreigners, to drink liters of Zwickel in a neighborhood Bier Beisl where despite our best efforts to blend in (and speak German) every patron stared in wonder at who we were.

Beyond some shallow yearning for "authenticity" (I don't even know if I believe in authenticity), I do prefer to lurk in such places, primarily because I am cheap and the prices are so much better in untouristed areas. At the suggestion of a SJ reader I am working on a huge post about our favorite things to see and do in San Francisco that aren't in the tourist guides. We figure almost everyone comes here at some point, and so many of you will, and if you think this website is worth reading maybe you'll think some of our favorite things to do are worth doing.

But before it's done, I have a favor to ask of you: I want to do a collaboration with some of you. In late August we are going to pack up our stuff and drive across the country with Juniper. This creates two questions:

1. How do you travel long distances with a kid? Are there any tricks or useful advice you have learned through hard experience that you wouldn't mind sharing with us? [I should add that any great advice we get on this could turn into something very big (it's a secret) but we promise to give you credit]

2. (and this is the big one) Do you live (or have you lived) within an hour of highways 50, 70, or 80, anywhere between Reno and Chicago?

If you can answer "yes" to #2, I want to hear from you via e-mail. Specifically, I want you to tell me about your favorite thing to see or do in your city or town. It doesn't need to be any more detailed than (a) what it is; and (b) why you love it, but please, be as detailed as you can. I may want to follow up and ask you more (or "interview" you about it). See, my inner Charles Kuralt really wants to plan a trip that allows me to get off the highway as much as possible and see things that really mean something to local people. I hate the monotonous conformity of interstate highway culture and would love to experience something that you feel really gives your chosen (or former) home true character and meaning. It could be a simple diner, a nature preserve, a historical landmark or museum, an awesome thrift/antique store, a single piece of architecture, an abandoned factory or a ghost town, a swimming hole, a cool playground, a cemetery, a roadside attraction, a crazy guy who puts all kinds of random stuff in his lawn, a cheap dive bar with unbelievable olive burgers, a department store that's been around for decades, an old insane asylum, a beautiful courthouse: anything that makes you proud of where you live or that you think defines the character of where you live (the more things, the better).

If you no longer live there, please write to me about something that you miss. I am very interested in the way we both love and loathe the places we're from. I find this ambivalence fascinating, and I think too often people talk about why they don't like where they live or where they are from rather what they do like about it. Probably because people just like to complain. If you've been reading this blog you probably know that I don't like chain restaurants or big box stores, primarily because I dislike the way they disrupt the culture of a place. I have a bit of Miniver Cheevy in me and I like to think about the past and history of a place. If you've been reading SJ for awhile and some clue about something any of us would especially like given our apparent tastes, all the better.

Depending on the response, I want to map out a route that allows us to stop and see some of the recommendations, and then I'll write a blog entry about it from the road. If you'd like to meet us and show us around, all the better.

Please e-mail us: sweetjuniper at gmail.com. Give us a reason to get off the goddamn highway.