Well we’re back from our tour-de-midwest, still in good working order.  I’d say that was a good, relaxing vacation.  Wednesday Donette was working in Omaha, and I just kind of hung out at the hotel and surfed the Internet.  Not too wacky, but I entertain easily so it worked for me.  Thursday we made the short drive to Lincoln, settled into the hotel, and then decided to go check out the town.  I’ve been “through” Lincoln several times, but can’t recall that I ever stopped, so it was something new to check out.  Donette pointed the car downtown and we ended up wandering into a district called the “Historic Haymarket.”  It turned out to be a lucky guess;  There was plenty of shopping, eating and drinking to keep us entertained for the rest of the day.  If you go down the list of establishments on that website there, that will pretty much tell you what we did all day.

Friday we made the drive to Lovewell Lake to do a little “camping.”  The quote marks are to indicate that we had no intention of actually staying in a tent or anything crazy like that, but since we were in fact at a State Park, and would be spending some amount of time in the outdoors, we called it camping.  The reason for the trip was the 15 year reunion of the group I went to Germany with during “The Big One of ’91.”  Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen some of these people.  You know it’s been too long when people bring their teenage kids that you’ve never met.  Heck one guy brought his six grandchildren.  Wow.  There was a great turnout though, good times.  You can probably make a pretty accurate guess how the weekend went from there…  Buncha people sitting around telling our old “war” stories and laughing until our guts hurt.  Several of them had also been on some much less desirable tours since our Germany trip, so we caught up on all that too.  On the downside, it absolutely dumped rain pretty much the entire time.  Didn’t really bother us too much though, because we were in a cabin Friday night and bummed a bunk in one of the many campers Saturday night.  There were a few tent-campers in the group, but they just bailed to a nearby hotel and then came right back.  Oh, and in the category of “it’s a small world,” my younger sister and her family ended up not only in the same State Park in the middle of nowhere, they actually camped directly behind us.  WEIRD!!  So, we also got to see them for the weekend, including the monumental event of my nephew Thomas taking the training wheels off his bike.

Sunday, naturally, we woke to a bright, sunny, cloudless day as we packed up to go home.  Go figure.  On the good side, since we weren’t really camping in the true sense anyway, we didn’t really have much to pack, and hence no muddy wet crap to load up.  We made the miserable treck across Kansas in pretty good time, picked up Gabe from boarding, and went home for a solid nap.  We woke up in time to go over to Susan’s for a fine spaghetti dinner, then watched Entourage.  That has taken the place of Sopranos as our Sunday night entertainment, and so far has served as a fine replacement.  For one thing, it’s only 30 minutes long so it doesn’t test the endurance of those of us with limited attention spans.  And, today, I guess it’s back to work, most likely for (gasp) a full week.  Probably should have thrown a “buffer” day in there…