1. Corn.
2. Trains at night
3. Midwestern thunderstorms and buckets of rain
4. Near-tropical lushness of Wisconsin
5. Soybeans.
6. Pleasantness of family -- 20+ second cousins and lots of old family photos
7. Shagging fly balls at Field of Dreams Movie Site in Iowa (FYI, "shagging" has nothing to do with Austin Powers...)
8. Pleasantness of Madison, WI -- only as large as Modesto, CA until the college kiddies arrive
9. Stupid toll system on Illinois interstate highways around Chicago (not the tolls themselves, but the piecemeal system used to collect them)
10. The dying (dead?) midwestern town
11. Corn.
12. $19/day Chevy Aveo with power nothing (locks, windows, mirrors, no cruise control, one cup holder). Big trunk though!
13. New Salem Historical Site outside of Petersburg with recreated building of mid-19th century town and costumed actors on hand to interpret (some better than others)
14. "Hearty" midwestern foodstuffs and the blissful release of a simple and light Subway sandwich
15. Pleasant lunch in downtown Maquokata, IA. Go ahead, try to guess the pronunciation.
16. Can there be patriotism without militarism?
17. Learning Pete's dad was known as "Pookie" back in the day and was fascinated by water going under bridges
18. Soybeans.

Still working on pictures and the unanticipated amount of family history video taken with the digital camera. We went through almost 4 GB of memory cards (had to keep buying them!).
 

Click the image to watch a 12-minute, 52 MB film of the Petersburg part of the trip. It's probably best to click the image then go put some tea on or do a load of laundry while the file loads.

The elderly people in the video are Pete's Uncle Earl and Aunt Gerrie. Everyone else is a cousin of some sort or other. 

What's with all the advertising nowadays that extols the virtues of having something done by hand? I hear radio commercials all the time for "hand-leafed" lettuce or "hand-scooped" ice cream. Um, I'd actually prefer you use an ice cream scoop to make my sundae instead of your hand, thank you very much. hehe And, combined with the Brittany-Spears-groan thing female voice-overs add to food commercials (and commercials for Las Vegas), it's all very weird. I'm just waiting for those companies that rip your CDs to your iPod for you to start claiming they "hand-rip" every CD...

Sheesh.

Ok, back to your regularly scheduled Sunday. 

...before he leaves for vacation in the wilds of the Midwest. It's a small family reunion of Pete's paternal family in Petersburg, IL this weekend (flying into Chicago). Following that, Pete and R3P drive north through rural Illinois to southwestern Wisconsin for a couple of days. "Because it's there" is the answer to why we're going to Wisconsin. On Wednesday we drive back to Chicago for our Thursday morning flight home. Lunch in Madison ("ooh, Madison" is what everyone has said today) along the way.

Pete spent about an hour finessing the planned route at Google Maps, using the new customizing feature. You can find it here (GM simply would not let us drive up IL 97 without strange jaunts off and back on the highway, hence all the "stops" near Petersburg -- strange).

Pictures when we get back!