Day 3- Jess y James join the 21st Century

Day 3 was pretty momentous...and expensive- We finally got a car that people don't mind riding in...(THANKS MAMA!!). Yes, we know that we collected bets on how long the little Mazda would last before petering out, but that was before Mom offered her AWESOME 2000 Camry with cruise control and side airbags. She wanted to TRADE!!??? We think she just needs a reason to buy a new car when the old one kicks the bucket, so she took our older, harder-ridden POS car so she'll have an excuse to buy one sooner.......We tried to talk her out of it a few times by telling her about all of the Mazda's "features" like broken headlight covers, water in the brakelight covers, and the other various quirks of the car, but she still wanted it so we transferred all of our stuff over and installed the coolest stereo this side of the Mississippi (THANKS CRICKET!!) in the Camry. We decided that if the Camry makes it all the way, we will award the winner of the "Guess the mileage" game to Vera Reiner, who guessed 350 miles before breakdown. We made it to Cleveland and ditched the car at 435 miles out.

We also bought a GPS to prevent our marriage from falling apart on this trip due to wrong turns and lack of planning. So far, we've still had a few wrong turns, as the GPS is not always up to date or has the exact address correct, but it has helped us a lot in the cities!!

James Frank got his first bluetooth hands-free ear bud thingy- so yup-tastic! See it featured in our Ohio and Indiana rap....

We drove about 6.5 hours today to Chicago to stay with my Aunt Carol and Uncle Jeff and cousins Danny and Jonathan, who hosted us for a night at their place in Elgin, IL. I haven't seen Carol and Jeff since my Dad's funeral and I haven't seen Danny and Jonathan since our pre-teens. I think Jonathan might have been 8 or 9. CRAZY! He is 24 this year!! He and Danny are both firemen like their Dad-- big surprise!! We had a ton of laughs and played with Danny's uber-cute pit bull Maia and lady-rotweiler Dozer. I've never seen such viciously sweet big dogs!! They were like monstrous lap dogs! Danny had to get up around 5 am for his shift so we headed to bed around 11:30 and got up early this morning and started driving!! More on Day 4 in our next installment....