I guess this day also needs to be duly recorded, but this was the long driving day of getting ourselves home. We left Ryan and Eric’s house early (and quietly), just around 7, stopped at a Starbucks for coffee, juice, and a scone, and drove, first in the rain, then in sunshine, all the way back to Lincoln. We stopped for Subway in Iowa City (first subway on this trip, yay!) and kept going. We used the Google traffic app to avoid an accident slowdown in Omaha (it’s amazing how all that works–they use cell phone data to show you real-time traffics density, and you can see the lines of red for slow traffic grow as you watch the map–crazy). To entertain ourselves on boring stretches, we tried to look up all kinds of random things on Wikipedia–we’ve done that all along. So by now, we know all kinds of things about national parks (including the one in American Samoa), on the flow of the Chicago River being reversed by engineers in the early 20th century, locks and canals and rivers and highways, not to mention the geology of the last ice age and the tides (including a little side trail on everything that the mathematician / engineer Kelvin had his hands in, which comprised tidal patterns, ship compasses on iron vessels, the first transatlantic telegraph cable, not to mention the second law of thermodynamics and the absolute temperature scale). We got home between 4 and 5, rested up a bit, and had dinner at noodles, where we got to watch the annual horde of Thespians try to demonstrate their individuality and artsiness. 🙂 We watched our first movie since before the road trip (we used screens for computers and iPads a lot on the road, but we didn’t watch any TV, Netflix, or other movies, and never had a hotel room TV on). The amazing thing was that we made it all the way through without falling asleep–a tribute to the quirky movie (“Chappie”), which offered some unexpected turns and intriguing sets. We went to bed after 11, glad to be on our own turf but happy with a wonderful trip–5432 miles total!