It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.

Tuesday evening in southwestern New Jersey. In some ways this ends the vacation that wasn’t. From a technical standpoint, yes, we did visit Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, but to say we actually got to experience and enjoy the cities involves a bit of overreach. The region has been gripped by a heat wave since we got here–some of the news reports we’ve seen on TV have called this the worst heat wave in over 20 years–and the oppressive heat has made it difficult to do anything.

It’s not just the outdoors that have been a problem. The weather has kept people indoors, crowding the venues where we went to escape the weather. Museums in both Washington and Philadelphia have been packed. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art, where we were this morning, was OK, but that visit was marked by Mathias coming close to putting a stick through Monet’s The Japanese Footbridge, on loan from the MoMA.)

The highlights of the trip, as it happens, have come from visiting people we know out here. We got to visit an old college friend, Brian, and his wife Kara in DC, and a friend of Lisa’s family up near Philly. Aside from that, we’ve plodding from place to place, taking break after break to escape from the heat, seeing a lot, but experiencing very little. Mathias has been a trooper, but an overheated preschooler does not contribute to a great trip.

We’re already talking about coming out here again a few years from now. Mathias may be a more appropriate age to enjoy some of what we’re seeing, and I can better plan for weather, Amtrak delays and other variables. This trip would’ve been aggressive for me traveling solo. I’m not sure what I was thinking thinking we could do all of this with a four-year-old in tow.

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And now it’s sad that I have to do this, but I have a paper to write for my last MBA class. More later.

Well, we’re in DC. The original plan was for us to arrive here on Amtrak yesterday afternoon, but the fatal flaw with that plan was having “plan” and “Amtrak” in the same sentence. The Empire Builder rolled into Chicago over three hours late, meaning our connecting train, the Capitol Limited, was already rolling east without us. Amtrak basically gave us three options: Take the train to New York and then connect to DC, a route that would get us into DC well past 11:00 Thursday night; stay at an Amtrak-booked hotel in the Chicago ‘burbs, and then run coach on the Capitol Limited (i.e. the “overnight coach with a four-year-old” option); or get a refund and make our own way to DC. While the overnight train trip was supposed to be one of the highlights for the trip for Mathias, with our planned option off the table, I wanted us to have control over our own destiny, so I got a one-way rental car from O’Hare and got us the heck out of there.

Additional train wrecks followed the missed Amtrak connection. After a tedious cab ride out to O’Hare that included the cab driver having to stop for gas, we got the car and made it to South Bend, Indiana, which seemed as good of a place to overnight as any. 1:30 in the morning is not a great time to find out that all the hotels are booked solid, but they were, and it took six hotel stops for us to finally grab a $140 room at the Comfort Suites—the last open room in the hotel. The next morning we learned there was a twirling competition in town, which made the breakfast area of our hotel look a bit like a scene out of Little Miss Sunshine, but at least the kids were quiet.

The drive across Pennsylvania was interrupted by a huge accident backup near Pittsburgh that cost us well over an hour and a half, and a construction backup in Maryland cost us another hour. In the end, it took some automotive contortion for me to get the rental back to Budget by a time reasonably approximate to its due date, only to find their “24-hour” operation at Reagan National unstaffed.

And so we spent today in DC. We drove around, visited the Air & Space Museum (which was packed), and did our best to avoid the heat. We’re camping in a friend’s house out here, and by all indications, Mathias seems to prefer lounging on couch in air conditioning than heading outside. And that’s something I completely understand.

Sometime within the next hour the folks who own this place should show up, and we’ll see what plans we can put together for tomorrow. Then Saturday night we’ll be heading up to Baltimore for a day there, and after that it’s a couple days in Philadelphia. If the heat will hold back for a bit it should be fun, but if not, I expect we’ll be staying indoors a lot.

I’d been hoping to get a few more posts in since returning from Europe, but life has been pretty stacked up.  There are a few papers that are suddenly going to be due in the next week or so, too, so posting here is a break more than anything.

Mathias had his fourth birthday party last weekend, a bit later than his actual birthday due to me being in Europe.  We’ve had birthday parties for him before, of course, but this one seemed to be a bit more legitimate due to the depth with which Mathias seemed to understand that this party was happening because he was getting older and/or bigger.  Anyway, it was a tremendously unorganized affair–we had snacks, but the kids basically could just go run anywhere whenever they wanted–which seemed to suit both the kids and parents just fine.

So, while last weekend was great, this one kind of sucked.  My Saturn blew its engine in central Wisconsin, and we’re now looking for a new car.

I have an irrational emotional attachment to my car.  Here’s what I posted about it on Facebook:

The car has scaled the Rockies; touched both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico; survived traffic in Los Angeles, Chicago and Manhattan; driven up Highway 1 and down Interstate 95; taken my wife on her first trip to the Badlands; taken my son on his first camping trip; and, of course, reliably carried me to work and school for over seven years. It now sits in Owen, Wisconsin.

I briefly looked at Saabs available in the Twin Cities, but there’s not much worth buying that doesn’t exceed my broke-grad-student debt tolerance.  The rental has to be returned to Wausau on Saturday, so it’s time to get looking.