Been absent for some days now. Had to drive from Wisconsin to Massachusetts and back. Youngest stepson (28) got married. His new wife's family is all from the Connecticut area and have apparently vacationed on Martha's Vineyard for 30 years so that's where the wedding was held.

Random observations on our trip through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, northern New York, and Massachusetts, in no particular order.

Lowest gas prices were here in Wisconsin. Highest by a good 10% were in New York. Used about 80 gallons of fuel in all and ended up with an average prices of $3.79. The good news was the car got an average of 32 mpg.

Illinois remains the epicenter of road construction. New York and Massachusetts had a lot of the orange "road work ahead" signs mounted but in a lot of cases there was no work at all being conducted.

Stopped just past Syracuse our first night out at a place called Turning Stone. Haven't been to Las Vegas since our granddaughter was born four years ago (it's where we married and had been where we went to celebrate our anniversary every August) so I picked Turning Stone for it's casino. Didn't have a reservation but they had rooms. Won enough dinking around on the slots that the room and our dinner cost us a net of $65, heh heh.

From there to the ferry was a more choppy drive based on the route we had to travel through Cape Cod, etc.

New York seems to like posting road signs that spell out their laws on driving more than any state I've been in. As in "do this twice and it's an automatic license suspension", etc.

Tolls, tolls, tolls, spare me from tolls. Spent well over $100 on the EZ Pass. Enough already.

Stopped in Cooperstown this past Monday on our way back. IF one is a fan of baseball it's not to be missed. Headed from there to Cleveland where we spent part of Tuesday at the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. Again, not to be missed.

Drove from Cleveland to Lafayette, Indiana so I could look at where my birth mother grew up. Got to visit her final resting place; her cremains are buried at the foot of my grandparent's graves in West Lafayette.

I'd estimate 2-4% of the people we saw on the trip were masked. Our route, other than Chicago, didn't take us through any major metro areas. Got caught up in stadium traffic late Monday afternoon in the Buffalo area.

Didn't really hear any casual conversations in our travels about Covid, energy issues, or Russia/Ukraine. Oddly enough didn't hear one word about DeSantis sending illegals to Martha's Vineyard even though they arrived, via plane apparently, just hours before we took the car ferry to the island.

Good to be back home and to "see" you all again.