Day 4

Well, we made it out of Grandma's house this morning. Alison and I just finished our longest day of the trip last night, having driven from 7am and finally arriving at her place at 10:30pm. Grandma was so happy to see us and had prepared dinner for our arrival. She arranged for Alison to stay in the computer room upstairs on a small mattress on the floor and I got to sleep in a guest room downstairs amidst grandma's unfortunate creepy crawly infestation. Poor grandma has been overrun by some weird caterpillar-like creatures after her basement flooded. She picked up 5 or 6 of them and then left me to take a shower before I went to bed. Both Alison and I slept like rocks after that long day of driving and felt refreshed when we awoke in the morning to a egg and bacon breakfast. Grandma gave us a nice send-off and we were back on the road again at about 11am.

As we left, Grandma warned us her next door neighbor took 9 hours to drive from Madison to Sioux City just a few weeks ago, which worried me that we would be late for dinner again at our next destination. However, my faithful GPS shared that it only would take about 8 hours, which would put us in Madison perfectly by dinner time.

The ride went smoothly, I took the first shift and stopped in Evansdale, IA for gas. Oh ya, since we didn't replace the ice in the cooler yesterday, it was about time that we had to check on the foodstuffs. Sure enough, the cooler with the turkey, 5 lbs of chocolate covered espresso beans, and cheese was filled with water and the seals on all 3 things were not exactly waterproof. The beans collected some turkey/cheese water and had melted some as well. Alison still ended up eating a few before her shift. I did too...

Anyway, we talked to Bill about 3 hours out and he gave us some directions to one of the buildings for Promega. When we arrived, he pulled up behind us in this sweet classic roadster and took me down to the parking garage below to collect a car we could use while we were there. He suited me up with his new bmw 536i which has been quite a bit of fun so far. We dropped the moving truck off in a parking lot and headed up to the guest house.

It turns out the guest house is what he uses when he invites scientists to see the research campus. The place was equipped with a large sauna behind a hidden door in a bookcase, granite countertop kitchen with Henkel's knifes (as Alison pointed out), and a beautiful bathroom. There was an attached conference room to the guesthouse that had all sorts of antique items from Korea and China.

Afterward we headed to a dinner at Mary's (Bill's wife) house of porkchops and wild salmon that was absolutely delicious. We found out that Bill's daughter Kristen is our age, had just graduated University of Iowa, and is headed to nursing school. We are planning on chilling out in Madison for the 4th of July with her and then heading out the next morning for God only know where.

We have about 850 miles left to North Carolina, which is 2 relatively short days of driving! We'll head out from Madison tomorrow morning.