Famille Du Pentium

This is the time of year where we haven’t had any holidays, vacations, or other family events to use as an excuse to take pictures of the kids.  So just ’cause it’s spring, here are some pics we took this week.  (Actually, this was a birthday party for our next door neighbors at the Skokie Exploratorium).

See The Latest Pics HERE 

I was spelunking through the site logs recently and noticed that a lot of people are using the search function to try to find the French version of this site.  I understand their frustration, what with "Famille" being a French word and all, I guess somehow it follows that the entire site should either be in French, or at least have a French translation.  So, to make sure that this post comes up whenever they search, I am putting the following search terms in to ensure that their search efforts get a hit:

en francais

french site

There.  Now that you’re here, here is a message that Google Translator told me to give you:

Earlier I described the road trip we’ll be taking to Disney later this year.  Our return trip is not quite as interesting, we stay an extra day in Orlando this year so we need to make a direct and quick run home, but the trip still deserves some color.   So open the map in a separate window and follow along.

Keeping with my previously explained practice of treating Orlando as one of our "stopovers", we’ll actually be traveling 11.3 miles / 24 minutes from our Disney Resort to our first stopover, the Royal Pacific Resort near Universal Orlando.   We actually will spend one day at Univeral Orlando park, then that evening we will go watch Blue Man Group (Sssh! It’s a surprise for Aaron…) and then get some sleep.

Starting fresh and early on Friday morning, we first head west on I-4, then north on I-75 to Atlanta, Georgia where we once again stay at a Holiday Inn Express (Hey, what can I say – points, pools, jacuzzis, and free breakfast.)

The next day we continue north on I-75 to about Chattanooga, where we turn northwest on I-24 toward Nashville, and then it’s back on I-65 northbound, where we’ll stay until we complete most of our journey.  We want to make tracks on our trip, so rather than stopping over in Louisville, we’ll keep going north on our second day until we reach Scottsville, IN, where we stay at our last Holiday Inn Express. 

Then we make the four hour trip back to Chicago via I-65 to I-90/94/80 where we’ll be staying overnight at Chez Humphries-Dolnick’s, and going back to work :(.

Some people think I’m crazy.  I like taking family road trips.  We’ve conditioned our kids from an early age to be fairly good road trip-ers.  This started as they were barely weeks old, and we would load them up in the car and take them to Lake Camelot in Wisconsin, four hours (at 80 MPH) from our house.  So, they like road trips too. 

Getting there is, indeed, half the fun.  So I’m going to share some of that fun with you now.  Here is a Google map of our entire outbound trip – you can open this in a separate window and play along as I narrate.  You might have to use the Google "grabber hand" to reposition the map so that the entire trip is visible.

First, there’s the route.  Outbound, we’re going due south until we hit Louisville, Kentucky.  On our last trip, that was our first stopover.  But that was barely 5 hours into our first day, and we had hit the road at 6AM, so we actually got the hotel about 2 or 3 PM.  Too early.  So this time, we’re still hitting the road early (6:30 AM) but stopping later.  Anyway, at Louisville, we turn east for a while, then south again toward Knoxville.  But the first day, we stop short of Knoxville, in London Kentucky.  We stay overnight at a Holiday Inn Express in London.

Day two, we continue south to Knoxville and then head somewhat southeast toward the Atlantic coast.  We go through North Carolina and South Carolina and then turn south toward Savannah, Georgia… where we stay overnight for the second night (again, a Holiday Inn Express). 

Day three is a real easy one.  Day one and two were eight hour drives (according to Google), now we’re driving about 4.5 hours from Savannah to Orlando, strait down I-95 and the Atlantic coast until we hit Daytona Beach, then I-4 back inland to Orlando.

We always treat our destination as a "stopover" – I.e. we get there one day earlier and get settled.  So we are actually staying in a different hotel on Day three PM than our Disney resort.  This time, we decided to try out the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando.   This looks like a lot of fun for the kids, albeit expensive.  Hey, it’s also a Holiday Inn, I get Priority Club points for it!

Finally after Nick Hotel, we make our way across town (if you use the zoom tool in Google maps, you can see our last leg) from Orlando to Lake Buena Vista, the official city name (well, one of them) for Disney World.  We’re staying at the Port Orleans Riverside resort, near Downtown Disney.

I’ll cover the road trip home in a separate entry.

I won’t go into the whole Passover story, like I did for Purim.  However, I thought this was an interesting side note.

Most of us know the story about the Jews escaping from hard labor in Egypt.  Not enough time to rise the bread, so we eat Matzah, yadda yadda, and then the parting of the Red Sea.

What few know is that actually, it didn’t go like things did in The Ten Commandments.  The Jews didn’t arrive at the banks of the Red Sea and suddenly things just opened up for them.  In fact, at first, (the story tells us), nothing at all happened.  It wasn’t until every Jew had completely immersed themselves before the miracle of the parting of the Sea occurred.  In fact, the story goes on to say that most had to go in far enough that they actually could not breathe until the sea was parted.

This was an extraordinary leap of faith.  No one knew for sure what to do next or what would happen, only that their God would see them through.  And only when things got as bad as they possibly could get (as with the faithful who dove in over their heads) did divine intervention save them.  

This story tells us a lot.  First, that faith – most importantly – is required for God’s intervention.  Second, even when God was imposing his will in the form of miracles that saved the Nation of Israel, personal human choice was required to make those miracles happen.  Faith first, and choice second.  That’s the way it has always been, even in the days of the Passover.

Happy Passover. 

For those of you who feel that Guiliani, McCain, and even Romney aren’t far enough to the right for your taste, you now have the heir apparent to the extreme right void left by these candidates – Tommy Thompson.

I like Tommy.  He was a four-term Wisconsin governmor during the years that I was vacationing up there.  He did a pretty good job.  And he’s very, very clear about what his candidacy is about: “I am the reliable conservative, my record shows that,” he said. “All that people have to do is look at my record, and I am one individual that they can count on.”

I wish I could rely on Conservatives practicing the Conservative values of the likes of people such as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.  Unfortunately, today a “Reliable conservative” means someone who will kow-tow to the religious right, and we don’t need more Jerry Falwell clones in office.