Let's get back to the story...
Around the beginning of August I headed up to Jolene's house in deep upstate New York. That night I did laundry, (a whole one day's worth) and we tracked down a collapsable cooler that we could use to keep stuff cold (duh). Since trunk space was a valuable commodity, we wanted something that we could just squish up when not in use, or not entirely filled. Jolene's aunt had one - essentially a large lunchbox - and she donated it to our travel fund. The next morning we made a quick trip to WalMart to buy a hatchet, then headed up into Canada.

I know you're probably thinking, 'Canada? What the heck are you going up there for?' While this is a valid question, it shows that you don't know your geography. Look at the map I've so helpfully included. Find Potsdam New York. Now find Allegan, Michigan. See that big blue thing in the way? Now, if you were going to drive from the one to the other, would you take the red line or the blue line? As it is, the red line is almost 650 miles, and we only had one day to do it. We breezed through Ogdensburg customs, b/c Canada doesn't really care what comes into the country, and were finally on our way.

That 14 hour car ride was the second longest car ride of my life. (The first longest was the 5 hour trip after Cassie's wedding) At that point Jolene and I weren't dating, or even discussing it, but we knew it was going to be a long drive, so we talked about everything else. At one point Jolene brought up baby corn and how it grows, but I don't think she'd be too happy with me if I wrote out that particular conversation. After a few hours in the car, we realised that we didn't bring any food with us, and we were running out of gas. And this was a problem because we also didn't have any Canadian money. Fortunately, Jolene had a card that could get her money in either country, and it would convert to Canadian automatically. We got enough to buy gas to get out of the country and a bag of M&M's, then sat in customs for three hours and got searched by the officials before finally escaping. Amazingly enough, there was a Burger King right across from the border, so we ate before we starved to death.

The next scene that comes to my mind took place in a rest stop. We had been driving for many hours, it was getting dark, and we still had over 100 miles to go. I pulled into the stop to get a soda and jump around like a lunatic because my legs were ceasing to work. We found an old pop tart in my glove compartment, and spent the next 20 minutes or so throwing it around like a frisbee intil it finally exploded. I can remember leaning against the drivers side door of the car staring at Jolene on the other side, desperately trying to think of something else to do that didn't involve getting in the car again.
I got out the maps and we spread them out on the hood and stared at them for a while, but unfortunately we still had a good 2 inches to go. I seriously debated staying in the rest stop overnight, but Courtney was expecting us that night, and we had a show to get to in a week, so I took one for the team and got back in the stupid car.

At some point, by some miracle we made it to Courtney's house. We came in, we said hi, and we went to bed. By then, I was so tired that I couldn't even pretend to be social. The only thing that sticks in my mind about Courtney's house, apart from the crazy stuffed animals all over that her dad had shot in Africa (like the kudu on the right), is that she packed way more than we had space for (we never told her about the size restrictions) so we made her dump some of it.

So then we headed south. Our next scheduled stop was in Muscatine, Iowa, (see the map below) which is right on the Mississippi river. Mark Twain said something nice about Muscatine at night in the summer, but I forget what it was. Our biggest concern with Muscatine is that it's the new (at the time) home of Mrs. Kraft. She used to live in my town, and we went to the same church. She's old, but doesn't act it, and loves to have people come over for dinner. My dad mentioned something to her about us driving out, and she invited us to stay with her on the spot. This was good, because I was already planning on staying there. We checked a map, and Muscatine wasn't a terribly long drive from Allegan, so we decided to take mostly back roads/secondary highways. We figured we'd get better gas mileage staying closer to 55 the whole time, plus we'd see more interesting things. And we were right.

We found her house, and she was thrilled to see us. She fed us some huge dinner, and we afterwards went for a walk trying to find the Mississippi river. We found it, but it was so dark we couldn't see it.
The next morning, we spread our maps out on the hot tub (the cover was on) because it was big and flat and made our plans. We had 4 days until we had to be in Colorado, so we decided to see some of the sights. We found a list of things to see in Nebraska and one of them was Chimney Rock. We all remembered it from the Oregon Trail computer game and decided to check it out. We connected the dots between Muscatine and there, and decided that we would try to get across Iowa that day. We found a campground on a lake by the border of Iowa and Nebraska in our AAA book for $8 per night. We talked it over, and concluded that it sounded perfectly reasonable. So we packed up our junk, Mrs. Kraft gave us sandwiches for the road, and we headed out into the unknown, destined for Nebraska. But before we got there, we stumbled across the National Sprint Car Museum and Hall of Fame.

We were cruising on highway 92 when we saw a sign that said 'NEXT EXIT, Attractions, Sprint Car Hall of Fame'. Jolene is more redneck than I am, but apparently Courtney has her beat, because she was the only one of us who knew what sprint cars were. I asked what sprint cars were. Courtney said they were these little cars that go wicked fast on dirt tracks. I asked if they were cool. She said they were, so I made an executive decision and we got off at the next exit.