The Great Adventure - Day 18

Sunday morning we woke up and checked out of our Best Western with it’s super unique layout.  We grabbed our free breakfast and hit the road for another long day of driving.

We had to try and get from the eastern side of Chicago over to mid-Minnesota by that evening to meet up with a friend of mine.  We’ve spent so many hours chatting via Facebook and promising to send each other photo tours of our homes that it was great to finally meet in person and also see her gorgeous farm home for myself.  I suppose I still technically own her a photo tour now ;)

We had one “small” detour in our trip that involved passing a MASSIVE flea market that we got lost in multiple times.  After over a solid hour of circling the booths with the last $16 of American cash we had, we both bought the same thing.  No, not sunglasses.  

Not the American money that Nick was trying to convince this coin collector to give us “on par” for our Canadian loonies and toonies.

Not a pony ride

And certainly not “corns”.  Really?  Corns?

It wasn’t “diabetic socks” either.  What are those anyway?  Socks with dietary restrictions?  I'm sure it's a real thing - I just have no idea what!

We each bought - are you ready for it?  A ton of plain, regular socks:

Socks are an endless source of debate in our house:  

Laura, you’re wearing my socks again.  I have no more socks.

They’re not your socks, they’re MY socks.  

No, they’re MY socks.  You wear YOUR socks.

I only own two pairs.  I need to wear yours!

Well, the Froese household has 20 more pairs to fight over now, and 10 of those are actually women’s, so now I have like 12 pair of socks ;).  (For those of you that don’t know - we do laundry approximately once every 3-4 weeks, so we need a lot of socks).

We stopped to fill up for gas mid-day at one of the many service centres that you can access without getting off the tolled highway.  We blew another American dollar to try and win one of these cups with gift certificates inside, but ended up just using the gift certificate given to me by one of my students for this trip.  Happy hour.  Two for the price of one :).  And yes, the whipped cream was worth all the suffering later.

We jumped back in the car and ploughed through into the night - with our new socks.

After a quick introduction to Chipoltes for a shared late-night burrito (you were right, Nick, they were actually good), we made it to the farm just after 10:30pm.

It was great to chat and catch up.  I skipped blogging that night, and am playing catch-up now, because I had a very early wake-up call the next morning to meet 47,000 new friends.  Stay tuned to see who they are ;)