Summer Vacation 2007

In the summer of 2007, we made a trip to Indiana and Ohio. We planned to fly from Oakland, California to Indianapolis on July 11. We were going to drive from there to my uncle's in Rushville, stay a few days, then drive to Ohio to visit my in-laws. We would visit with them a while, then leave our boys with Grandma Carole and Grandpa Jack and drive to visit friends in Baltimore for a long weekend. We were going to spend one day in Washington, D.C., it being so close to Baltimore, but we ended up not going. From there, we planned to go back to Ohio for a couple more days, then back to Indiana for a day or two, and then fly back to California on July 26.

Getting ready for the trip, I did some research on things we might like to do. I found some info on three museums in Indianapolis, the Indiana State Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, none of which we ended up going to on this trip. I also looked up every Cracker Barrel that we might encounter between Indianapolis and Baltimore. My wife, Kelley, loves eating at Cracker Barrel and there are none in California. We knew they would be a reliable source of food along the way.

I also did a little research on Morristown, Indiana, were I grew up before moving to California. The population hasn't changed much, at only 1,133 people in 2000, 98.5% of them white. The people there very much reflect my own ancestry. 25% of the people are of German descent, 14% Irish, 12% English, 3% Scottish, and 3% Scotch-Irish. It's a small town, just one square mile in size.

The biggest news event connected with Morristown was the mention of a category 4 tornado that passed 6.2 miles away on April 3, 1974. It injured seventeen people and caused between $5 million and $50 million in damages. I recall that storm. We had a tornado warning while we were in school. And I remember seeing some of the damage it caused to an outdoor movie screen just a few miles outside of town.

I jotted all these notes down in the journal I bought for the trip. Of course, I made a list of all the things we would take on the trip, planning for myself, my wife, and our two boys. But I also wrote down a few favorite vegan recipes. I picked ones that I could make with ingredients that I thought I could find anywhere, nothing exotic. For breakfast, I copied Claire's Couscous Porridge from one of Sarah Kramer's cookbooks and a peanut butter banana pancake recipe. Other favorites are the Spicy Black Bean Burgers, Chickpea Toss, and Megadarra, all from one of Sarah Kramer's three vegan cookbooks.