Day 3.23: Chesterton, IN to Kent, OH

We got up and tried to work out in the hotel fitness center, but the machines were mostly broken, which was regrettable. We did spend some time swimming laps in the pool, then had breakfast and got ready for the day. We knew that Tropical Smoothie Café, the chain we had discovered in Arkansas back in February and then visited again in Michigan, was offering a free Sunshine Smoothie to anyone wearing flip-flops on National Flip Flop Day, which happened to be this very day. We were fortunate to be able to locate a store outside Youngstown, Ohio.

Our drive technically only took us from Indiana to Ohio, but when we got off to stop at a rest area at one point we past a sing thanking us for visiting Michigan, which we obviously did only very briefly. We had to wait a while for the smoothies because it was crowded, but they were pretty good and it was nice to have something to break up the drive. We made it to Kent without hitting any traffic and headed to the supermarket, where we found the largest watermelon we’d ever seen for only $5! We arrived at Aaron and Liz’s three weeks after we had last been there with not too much time to spare before dinner. Aaron made a delicious tagine (some of which Abe took home the next day), and we met an eclectic crowd of guests for the Shabbat dinner he had organized. We experienced lots of musical moments during the brief Shabbat service and dinner, and we played Jewish geography with Aaron’s rabbi friend and future rabbi friend.

We also met a visiting student from Alaska who was preparing to go hunt a wolf. We didn’t realize how late it was by the time everyone left. It was after 2am, and Liz insisted that she’d be up in the morning to go with us to the farmer’s market before we left. Because we wanted to get on the road early in the morning, we went right to bed.

Approximate number of miles covered: 338