Jack Manassas and Company

October 18, 2015, Sunday We stopped at the I hotel in Champaign Illinois. This is a great hotel stay in! It was the first good night sleep we have had since the trip began. While in town, we took pictures of the alumni statue, as requested by uncle Rollin, and Miriam’s childhood home on W. Washington St. in Urbana-also Jim Bray's childhood home, the blue house right next to it.

October 17, 2015, Saturday After breakfast, we printed route and made hotel reservations in Cincinnati Ohio, Champaign Illinois, and Cedar Rapids Iowa. We got on the road at 10:30 AM. We must drive seven hours today. We stopped for lunch at the Princess Diner in Frostburg Maryland, where we ate lunch at the halfway point of our scenic train ride from Cumberland last year. We stopped at the first rest stop in West Virginia.  You can see their state prison from the parking lot-- and it is snowing! I took a photo of a huge truck with a yellow container marked "radioactive." I got out the radiation meter. At 150 feet, the count was 45 to 60 microrems per hour, and the meter was beeping from some of the radiation bursts. Since the background levels here are 9 to 13 microrems per hour, the truck is definitely putting out some radiation. I sure hope the driver has a film badge! :-( We stopped in Harrison, Ohio, near Cincinnati. We had lunch with uncle Rolli...

October 16 2015, Friday, 4:03 PM, Columbia Maryland We said goodbye to our house and Columbia Maryland today. Goodbye to everything, and off to start a new adventure. What a terrible ordeal, moving at age 58 in half! It was four days of work for the professional packers to pack everything up -- and we worked round-the-clock to sort through what we needed to keep, and toss everything else. Brown's movers packed it all, hired by Rainier. That was October 5 to October 8.  We spent last night at the Hampton Inn, 2 miles from our house, just to sleep in a bed!   Everything else was packed, and the house was empty.  So today, we will head for Morgantown. Don and Sandy will ship the rest of our stuff on the pallet to the pickup dropbox in a week or so. Very helpful, and so appreciated! We drove until 7 PM, started getting sleepy, and stopped at a Comfort Inn in Hagerstown.