Mom was in Winchester, Indiana for the Steel Guitar convention with Phil. Debbie is working at a WalMart in Sterling, Illinois. We decided to get together at Rensselaer, Indiana for a short visit since it was about 3 hours travel for each of us. What we didn't know was that Mom and Judy plotted to get her there, too - she traveled to Winchester from her home in Campbellsville, Kentucky and then drove over with Mom to Rensselaer. Surprised both me and Debbie!
We met at the Burger King there since Mom is now vegan and BK has a veggie burger. We had several hours of visiting, lunching, picture sharing, and a good time was had by all. Good thing that nobody wanted to do much else since there wasn't much else to do in Rensselaer!
Mom and Debbie compared injuries. Mom had her hand slammed in a car door while in California, breaking a bone. Debbie had a compound fracture of her little finger in a fall at work. Judy and I both forgot to bring the bubble wrap for them! We felt left out because we didn't have X-rays to show...
After we all said our goodbyes and headed our separate ways, I decided to do a little caching in the Rensselaer area since it had been dark the night before. After caching, I stopped at the local WalMart to pick up some pop that didn't have Michigan deposit. Will be nice to just recycle the cans for a change instead of having to haul them back to the store. Anyway, I ended up leaving my coupon box in the cart. Didn't know that, of course, until Steve called me about an hour down the road, letting me know that Walmart had called. To make a long story short, they are going to mail me the box, very nice of them. I offered to give them my credit card # to pay the postage but they said it wasn't necessary.
Not too long after that, heading north toward Michigan City, the clouds were suddenly starting to get VERY dark. Freakingly dark. Stopped to call Steve to see what he could see on radar. No signal. The next town was LaCrosse, IN, where there was a cache in a small park. As I approached, I could tell there'd already been some rain. Still, it wasn't raining right then so quickly made the cache find. Then tried to call Steve again. Answering machine. By then the wind was really picking up so turned to the radio (had been listening to CDs) and found out there was a severe thunderstorm warning for the area I was in. Still not bad, even looked a little clearer, so decided to go ahead. Rain got pretty heavy, slowing traffic, and it did get windy, but thankfully no hail or even worse. Clearing up by Wanetah, so stopped for a potty break at the Burger King next to the gas station/DQ I'd stopped at yesterday. Believe it or not, I had an -eggnog- shake. They were out of their featured flavor so found some eggnog flavor. Weird to have an eggnog shake in July - must have been my Christmas in July celebration!
From Wanetah did a couple of Indiana Spirit Quest caches (cemetery caches in very old cemeteries - really interesting to see the old stones.) Then stopped and did a couple on the Purdue University North campus at Westville. The first, a DNF, and nobody was around. I mean nobody. Then there was another quite near the entrance to the area. Since I hadn't seen anybody, parked close by on the road even though it was not really a parking area. Sure enough, I came back from the find to see a security car nearby. They didn't stop me, though, and the cache page did indicate security was aware of the caches on campus, so I'm sure (with the geocaching bumper stickers I have on the cachemobile) they figured out what I was doing. And with no traffic I wasn't exactly blocking anything. So almost my 2nd geocaching LEO.
Did a few park & grabs in Michigan City then decided it was time to just go on home. That meant taking I-94 and I-196 instead of going back the way I came. Bad thing about that was I didn't have caches loaded up that way, so it was a pretty much cacheless trip from there. Arrived home at 9:45 p.m., tired and glad to be home to see Steve and Max.
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