Here's a little on the trip I just finished..  Well, maybe more than
you care to hear..

The trip out took 2 days.  The first half was pretty interesting with
Buffalo, Erie, and Cleveland but it gets flat and desolate from there.
The first night I stayed in South Bend, Indiana.  This was well over
half way so I had time to look around more on the second day.  I poked
around South Bend a little but that ended up putting me in Chicago
during the morning rush.  It wasn't that bad but I did take longer to
get through than I might like.  I also took a side tour of Madison,
WI, and I ended up driving through the U of W campus.  I got to see a
bit of the Wisconsin Dells which was nice, and got to Minneapolis
early in the evening.

While in Minneapolis, I did a lot of driving around to get to know the
area (mainly to find good food places).  It's a very nice area, in
general.  A good chunk of St. Paul seems to be very suburban and
generally nice.  I found some of the upscale suburbs too but very few
places which seemed to be bad neighborhoods.  They have nice
bike/walking/skating trails along both sides of the river which really
made me wish I had room for the bike.  It was too hilly and too
crowded for my ability on the skates.  I did find a small park on
campus where I could skate, but I only got out there once.

The campus itself is huge compared to the ones I'm used to.  It's on
both sides of the Mississippi, in Minneapolis.  I was on the East
Bank.  My motel was a 10 or 15 minute walk from the part of campus
where my office was.  Other than just the size of it, the impressive
parts of the campus were the food, which wasn't great but was very
cheap (and blew away anything RPI serves), and the rec center.  I had
to pay for a pass to use it but it was well worth it.  They had pretty
much everything in this place, and I tried to get there at least for a
little while every day.  Right near there is also Mariucci Arena (the
new one) and Williams Arena (including the old Mariucci).  The area
around the campus is generally decent, with 2 main clusters of
restaurants and shops.  The one closer to me is called Stadium
Village, because it is near where the old football stadium was.  The
rec center and aquatic center were actually built inside the old
stadium, which was still standing around them when I was there in
1992, but is now a parking lot.  The other area is called Dinkytown
and has pretty much any kind of food you want.  It was a little too
far to walk and parking is tough, so I didn't eat in Dinkytown as much
as I probably should have.

The main things I did for fun were long drives and baseball games.  I
went on two major trips.  One was a loop through central Minnesota,
including St. Cloud, Brainerd, and Mille Lacs.  The second was the
huge one which went up to Duluth (to see Lake Superior), then up to
International Falls and Voyageurs National Park, and back on down.
The other trip I wanted to do was a Dakotas loop up to Fargo and down
through eastern South Dakota, but with all the floods up there the
last thing they probably needed was me sightseeing.  And as for
baseball, I saw 6 Twins home games.  The teams that came in were the
Rangers, Angels, Royals, and Orioles.  The Twins won only 2 of the 6
games.  I took three people to their first ever baseball game, which
is always fun.  Weeknight games were $1 with a student ID which was an
added bonus.

The important stuff at the University was mainly in the last 2 weeks.
I got to meet and hear talks from a lot of the big names in the field.
There were people from all over the world, and a lot of days when 5 or
6 of us would go to lunch, I was the only American citizen.  Very
interesting to talk to these people.

After a month in Minneapolis, I headed out, taking a slightly scenic
route from Minnesota to New York which went through Iowa, Missouri,
Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Tennessee,
Georgia, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North
Carolina, Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey
over the course of 10 days.  Day 1 was Minneapolis to Kansas City.
The only major city along the way was Des Moines which was nice.  I
was surprised by the southern part of Iowa which had actual hills and
actual trees.  And the main purpose for this leg of the trip was the
Yankees at the Royals that night.  Being the road team, I got to see
the Yanks up close during BP.  Very fun.  I also got a Royals umbrella
out of it, although they didn't want to give me one with my Yankee
shirt and hat and all.  The next day was an easy trip across Missouri
on I-70 to St. Louis.  The next 2 days were spent touring St. Louis
(the zoo, assorted parks, Wash U, etc etc) with Charles.  We also got
to the Braves-Cards game on the second night.  Game #8 on the trip.
We didn't have time to go up in the arch, but we did go down to the
park and saw how high up the 1993 flood marker was.  Amazing.

The next day was a lot of driving, right on down past Paducah,
Nashville, Chatanooga, Atlanta, and Macon to Cordele, GA, probably
about 100 miles north of the Florida border.  The most impressive part
was a mountain pass on I-24 which was about as good as any I've seen
in the East.  It really had more of a Rocky Mountain feel, which was
probably enhanced by having spent the previous 5 weeks in the midwest.
I also enjoyed listening to Yankee baseball on WABC from NY all the
way down I-75.  Amazing how well it came in from so far away.

Since I made it most of the way on day 1, I got to take the scenic
route to Orlando the next day.  Just past Ocala, I cut across to the
Gulf coast and ended up at Clearwater Beach.  I didn't stay long, but
the beach was very nice.  The gulf sand is so much finer and whiter
than anything you see on the East coast.  But no waves makes it a
little boring.  After that I went over to Orlando to check in and see
what was new in the area.  And to hook up the PC only to have the
monitor die on me...

The next day was my day of rest after the drive and before Disney.  So
I went for yet another drive over to the east coast.  I ended up in
Cocoa Beach for a little while and saw Ron Jon Surf Shop but didn't go
in.  The beach was the typical Atlantic beach (as opposed to the gulf)
with some actual surf.  That night, I picked up Sue at the airport and
we spent the next three days at Walt Disney World.  Mainly Epcot on
Friday, Magic Kingdom on Saturday, and Disney/MGM on Sunday.  Big
Thunder Mountain Railroad made the whole trip worthwhile.  We went on
it twice.  It was pretty crowded but we avoided the popular stuff
during the peak hours and got to see everything we wanted with no
problem.

I dropped Sue off at the airport on Monday morning around 11 and
started heading north.  I wasn't sure how far I'd get since it was a
bit of a late start.  I made it to North Carolina by dark.  I wasn't
all that tired, plus there was plenty of baseball on the radio (White
Sox on WMVP from Chicago, Twins on WCCO from Minneapolis, Indians on a
Cleveland station, Orioles on WBAL) so I kept going.  The Orioles game
was on the west coast, so that took me up to around 1 AM and southern
Virginia.  I had decided by this point that I wasn't going to bother
with a hotel room.  I stopped for about an hour at a rest area south
of Richmond and by 2 AM I was ready to go again.  I drove up through
Richmond, Washington (could go right through at 3 AM - no traffic...)
and Baltimore.  By about 3:30 I was getting tired again so I stopped
for another rest in Maryland.  When it started to get light around
5:30 I was awake and ready to make the rest of the trip.  I hit some
traffic on I-287 in NJ but other than that the rest of the trip was
smooth.  I made it home just before noon.  6338.1 miles and 21 states
later.