Made it to the SPAM Museum! It's telling, albeit not flattering, that I've spent most of my road trip time visiting museums about food or sports. I asked the tour guide what breads are recommended for eating SPAM, and she said one of their chefs made a great recipe for SPAM on ciabatta.

We didn't stay long enough to eat, though - we'd come to Minnesota not to absorb the fascinating history of America's top mystery meat but to pick up another member of my new family. Great Aunt Strawberry Gordy (that's her actual name) is, so far, the most eccentric member of the Gordy bunch, though it's unclear what about her is so eccentric. Asking a Gordy about Strawberry usually makes that Gordy turn his/her eyes toward the ground and mumble something about how "Great Aunt Strawberry loves Mount Rushmore." I pressed a little more and got one of the brothers to say that Great Aunt Strawberry is allergic to strawberries. Great Aunt Strawberry thinks my name is Zach and keeps asking me for cheese popcorn. "I know right where it is!" she says. Where is the cheese popcorn? Next to the SPAM, of course.

Now listening to: "Hello, I Must Be Going" by Groucho Marx

(Photo by eldan via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Day 2 of being RV-driving Midwesterner Marcus Gordy. The Gordy clan is really nice. They don't seem to mind that my last name is Franz, not Gordy, or that I live in New Hampshire, or that my parents are from California. No one's even upset that I don't remember the Easter that Aunt Lorna drank the purple egg dye by mistake. As far as they care, Cousin Marcus is part of the family. So I'm taking part in their whole family road trip, which is going to end up sometime next week at Mount Rushmore. It's on my way, and it's actually kind of fun having an alternate identity.

The Gordys apparently go through Green Bay no matter where they're going. "Five years ago we went to St. Louis by way of Green Bay," said Uncle Dan, laughing until he collapsed from abdominal pain. Dan's a financial planner back in Illinois; he says he once saved Chris Farley from mailing a million dollars to the Chicago Cubs' equipment manager. He and his sons, Bill and Jason, are riding in my RV, while the rest of the group is fanning out in station wagons, minivans and one really rusty Grateful Dead-style bus. The reason they insist on going through Green Bay? So that when they cross a certain spot on the highway they can all yell "PAAAAAAACCCCCCKKKKKEEEEEEEERRRRRRRSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!" and then drive to Lambeau Field for a picnic. Some people actually cheered back at us! Cousin Marcus is thinking about coming out to the reunion next year, too.

Now listening to: "Dazzling Stranger," Wizz Jones

(Photo by random letters via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Still no sign of my car, but I'm back on the road - though, as usual, not quite in the way I expected. Otis H. Basketry did get me a new rental, but it's not a car. It's an RV. Not anything against the RV crowd, but there's a reason you see RVs on the highway and at campgrounds and not, say, downtown Detroit. So I avoided Chicago proper and drove to Illinois State Park for beach/camp/RV atmosphere. When in Rome, right?

So I walk to the beach with a towel, a 2-liter of Jolt cola and a gallon of sunscreen, wearing the t-shirt I bought at the Motown Museum (a "Gordy" t-shirt, in honor of Berry) and had left on for the last three days. Almost immediately I'm surrounded by happy people hugging me and dragging me over to a sun tent. As it turns out, the Gordy family of Crystal Lake, Illinois, start their annual family reunion here the second Friday of every June, and my Motown t-shirt meant that I'm actually Cousin Marcus from New Hampshire. I was ready to flee when Grandpa Dennis put his arm around me and says "By the way, I've got your hotel key - my treat this year, since your dad paid for all of us last year." Plus, they make great hotdogs. I guess I've been adopted.

Now listening to: "Not Even Dust," Sleep Out

(Photo by chascarper via Flickr/Creative Commons)

My car is gone. I slept in, had breakfast, checked out of the hotel and went out to the parking garage ready to hit the road for Chicago, only in place of my car was a set of half-deflated mylar Garfield balloons. The hotel checked their surveillance tapes and there's no sign of the car even leaving that lot. So I'm assuming the worst.

On the plus side, I still have all my phone, my laptop and my clothes - brought them into the hotel to do laundry. On the minus side, I'm stuck in Detroit until my boss back in New Hampshire, Otis H. Basketry, can set up a rental car for me to get to California and pick everybody up. He did say that if my car doesn't turn up, they'll get me a new one, which is cool. The hotel I was staying at had no vacancy for tonight, so I had to walk through the middle of Detroit with a bag of laundry until I found a motel with wi-fi.

On top of it all, while I'm sitting here wishing I was on the road: Word of Mouth back in New Hampshire is doing an interview about a road trip!?!?!

Now listening to: "Motel Blues," Big Star

(Photo by Ashley Dinges via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Great day! Easy border crossing and lots of sightseeing - stopped by Comerica Park, home of the Detroit Tigers, though they were in Chicago playing the White Sox, and then dropped by the Motown Museum. And no one in my tour group asked any ridiculous obscure questions!

Got a great parking spot at the hotel, and room service had really excellent burritos! I had probably 12 churros, too. Mmmmmmmm.

The confusing, difficult part of this road trip is officially over. Let the good times roll.

Now listening to: "Little Trouble Girl," Sonic Youth

(Photo by josephleenovak via Flickr/Creative Commons)

I've been trying to avoid places I drove through on last year's trip, partly to see new places, but mostly because I'm afraid the locals will remember me from last year and throw me in jail. This is why I avoided Buffalo, where I literally ended up in police custody, and instead drove up over Lake Ontario and into Toronto. This isn't a fun summer road trip, after all, it's business travel! Got to keep things on an even keel.

Toronto is cool. Went waaaaaaay up in the CN Tower, and then went to the Hockey Hall of Fame, my second HoF in two days. I'm more into baseball than hockey, but the exhibits were cool. A dude in this tour group asked the guide: "Do you think Rocket Richard would have been as effective offensively if he'd played in the dead-puck era?" The sport may change, but the stat addicts remain.

Dinner in Toronto's Chinatown. Scarfed down lo mein under a picture of (allegedly) Shania Twain scarfing down lo mein, at the same table. I'm in elite company.

Now listening to: PJ Harvey, "White Chalk"

(Photo by ajschu via Flickr/Creative Commons)

The Hall of Fame is... wow. So much to see - and yet the more you see, the more questions you have. What was it like to see Babe Ruth hit a home run? How great was Satchel Paige? How fast was Walter Johnson? And, as a dude in my tour group asked repeatedly to every employee: "Do you think the Brooklyn Dodgers would have traded Sal Maglie to the Yankees, if it had been in the era of sabermetrics?" I love stats too, but find the balance, man! Managed to not take my own advice in one of the exhibit areas, losing my balance and nearly smacking into the case carrying Yosh Kawano's hat. Dinner? Peanuts and crackerjacks, of course. Though I do care if I ever get back. My crazy robot-building friends in California and my electricity-through-bread employer are counting on me.

Now listening to: Marvin Gaye, "Everybody Needs Love"

(Photo by ewen and donabel via Flickr/Creative Commons)

The Yankees may have been in town, but I was going nowhere near the ballpark owing to last year's misadventures in the Bronx. So I decided to get my baseball fix in Cooperstown next week, while doing something in the city that would not result in me carrying around hundreds of decades-old Reggie Bars. So I went to the Central Park Zoo. Our tour guide was originally from Spain, though I swear he was a dead ringer for Billy Bob Thornton. His name tag did say "Roberto" - could this be Billy Bob's day job, like how David Lee Roth is a paramedic when Van Halen's not on tour? Our group asked lots of questions - most of them were about the animals. I asked if Central Park saw an influx of rural squirrels trying to make their way to the city. Billy Bob/Roberto chuckled and said he had a squirrel that lived outside his apartment, and that the people in his building all called the squirrel "Mr. Woodcock, like that movie"(!). Enquirer, can I sell you an exclusive?

Now listening to: The Raincoats, "Lola"

(Photo by twinxamot via Flickr/Creative Commons)

My new Cameroonian buddy Patrick and I may come from different continents, but we're like peas in a pod. We're both very pro-bread (he's going to launch a Viva Bread party there - Partie de pain vive!). We both love disco, though he says Cameroon's universities don't have History of Disco programs (yet). And when a squirrel lands on the windshield of a Prius, we both yell the same bleepable words.

Yes, we hadn't been on the highway ten minutes when a squirrel landed on the front of the car and started chirping at us through the windshield glass. I pulled over right away to let the squirrel jump off. He was back to the woods, we were back on the road, everything was back to normal. Only the squirrel hadn't gone back to the woods - he'd jumped into the backseat, which we discovered an hour and an Adirondack Park Preserve later. A country squirrel determined to get to New York. We named him Joe Buck, after Jon Voight's famous movie role.

There was at least one other difference between the cinematic and squirrelatic Joe, though. "Oh dear," Patrick said, half-worried, half-amused. "This squirrel likes caramel!"

The squirrel had not only invited himself along, he'd gotten into Patrick's caramel-filled pastries - the same ones that had me in a paranoid, sugary stupor in Montreal! We drove through the tree-filled splendor of upstate New York with a sugar-high squirrel zipping around the back seat. So we turned the radio way up - cool story on All Things Considered about an American woman in France who saved 60 airmen during WWII.

Made it to the city late - I dropped Patrick and Joe the squirrel at the airport. I heard him say something about "when we get on the bus to Miami," which hopefully was just a movie reference.

Oh, also: every time I've been through New York I've ended up in the exact same hotel room. Guess where I'm staying tonight?

Now listening to: Harry Nilsson, "Everybody's Talkin'"

(Photo by dave_7 via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Crossed the border (eventually), but with Patrick the Cameroon delegate on board - he missed his flight back home because he was trying to coax me out of sugar-fueled paranoid rollerskating in downtown Montreal, so it was kind of my fault. Of course, I wouldn't have been full of sugar if he hadn't made those caramel-filled pastry things... anyway, he booked a new flight out of New York City (Patrick: "I have to try real New York City bagels!") so I'm on my way to the same city that gave me a pickle barrel full of candy bars from the 70's last year.

Now listening to: Cheap Trick, "Y.O.Y.O.Y."

(Photo by Smaku via Flickr/Creative Commons)