My trip here yesterday was long, 515 miles, but I made it in one day. I know I would have never done that if I had been driving the rig. The roads in places were less than wonderful, and the wind would have been a factor in a high profile vehicle. I had a couple of offers of places to stay for the night along the road, but once I had John Denver and Peter, Paul, and Mary belting out their tunes, I sang my way through the last 250 miles. I truly appreciated the offers, but wasn’t ready to stop at two in the afternoon.
Shortly after 5:00, I found myself in Robyn’s driveway. I think just about any meal I don’t have to prepare myself is delicious, so it was a treat to sit down to a meal brought in by Dennis’ mother. A dip in their pool with the grandgirls in the early evening went a long way to relax the stiff joints from the long drive.
First thing this morning, grandgirls Avery and Phoebe pointed out the mama and papa geese across the road and all their babies. When they were all lined up in the water, I counted seven little ones.
In the late morning, I accompanied Robyn on one of her work trips to provide a patient with needed medical equipment. We were stuck in traffic for quite a while as we passed this famous skyline on the back side of the Loop in Chicago. It’s hard to mistake what I will always refer to as the ‘John Hancock Building’. I think it’s now called the Morris Tower/Building. It certainly is a behemoth.
After a time consuming drive, we arrived at the West Suburban Medical Center. While she went inside to work with the patient, I got in my exercise for the day.
I did walking laps around the top level of the parking garage. My back and hip seemed to be better today, so I was able to get in some good walking finally. Even though we were over six miles due west, ‘Big John’ was still a part of the landscape. In the four years Robyn has been doing this job, she’s been to about 75 different facilities in Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. She does an awful lot of driving, and is very comfortable zipping around the Chicago metropolitan area. I prefer to be the passenger these days. There seems to be a lot more people on the roads than when I was first learning to drive and the Kennedy, Dan Ryan, and Eisenhower Expressways were pretty new. It took us about five hours to get to this one fitting and back home again. 
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After supper, Avery and Phoebe demonstrated their bicycle riding skills around the swimming pool. Rain showers moved through this afternoon lowering the temperatures, so we passed up taking a dip this evening.
Little Phoebe is a year older than when I saw her last year, and has grown out of the lopsided gait of a toddler. She fairly flies around now that she’s almost three. Her language skills have improved as well, so I’m no longer just ‘Belt’, I’m now Gramma Belt. Guess that means I’ll have to stop calling her ‘Buckle’.
Thanks for stopping by… talk to you later, Judy
