Day 9 Chicago, Il to Cleveland, OH

We had breakfast down the street from Tiffany's house at a bagel shop and starbucks. This was quite exciting for me at least because I got to drink semi-real tasting coffee and eat a bagel! Have I mentioned that I hate road food? Well I do. We drove around Chicago a bit and saw lots of parks and then we were off. At the request of Ed I shall add some details about what the car rides entail. In the mornings Marc generally drives because I can't really stay awake before 10 am so he drives while I sleep for the first hour or two. Then I wake up and he asks me for neck massages which I give. We listen to music but at this point we're both sick of every song on our ipods and in our cd collections so maybe we'll listen to a little bit of the Mark Twain cd that Marc's mom gave him. The conversations range from exciting tidbits from the Why Zebras don't get Ulcers book that I'm reading, to the people we've stayed with the evening before, to family drama, etc. We arrive in Cleveland around 6pm and promptly get ourselves completely lost, to add to our difficulties a baseball game is going on and traffic is a little bit complicated. After a couple of phone conversations with Pam, our host for the night, we make it to her house. Marc negotiates with the house of blues owners next door to let us park in their garage over night. We are quite pleased to arrive at Pam's huge 1 bedroom where she and her boyfriend Rafael treat us like royalty, going out to pick up takeout Thai while we watch a dvd of "Weeds". A lovely dinner ensues complete with french wine, homemade dessert, and good friends, life is good.