vacation pt.2

Good morning world! It's a beautiful Monday morning, the grass is wet, the birds are cold, and I didn't hit any horses on the way to work. Good deal. I'm content with all of these facts.

I'm still rolling along with the vacation blogs but am realizing that I'm not doing it very diligently. I didn't write at all last week, I blame stress and diet. But, I kept a sketchbook the entire trip and it's filled with a bunch of narrative. I plan on scanning in a few choice entries for a blog. But until then,

Peoria

Rachel and I were in Peoria for a few days. We had some adventures and were ridiculously social. Some highlights include: a visit with Juice and her puppy, letterboxing jaunts in various historic graveyards, lots of salivating over really nice road bikes. Steve worried about sewage in a basement, we all ate way too much ice cream (and Avanti's cheap Italian food, delicious), and rachel and I found a hilarious caterpillar.
Some Peoria Hot Spot Stops include: Avanti's, One world, Emo's, Co op Records, Mexican food, country road driving, pool, Blue, The Peoria Art Guild, Art Show, etc
Some people I saw: Rik, Juice, Erica, Gabe, Gabe, Bruce, Drew, Steve, Chris, Shannon, Christian, Bethany, Rachel's mom, Oscar, Ann, Sarah, Heather, Dave, Sarah, Eliz, Beth, Christy, Janet, oh man and the list goes on, I'll add to it...if I forgot your name it's because it's early and I still love you.

And in case you're wondering about the clown photograph, let me explain. This clown is the face of Peoria as far as I'm concerned. It's the Emo's ice cream shack marquee. I have countless memories of friends and I sitting on colorful parking lot benches while we munched on coney island dogs. Their ice cream is fabulous and the place does all it's math by hand. No fancy registers at that place (a math teacher opened up the icecream place many years ago. To encourage his young employees to be diligent at basic math he eliminated the register).

The first time I went to Emo's a girl named Dani brought her rabbit with us. The rabbit's name was Yishi Spudnick and I wanted to hold her while I ate my ice cream. Bad idea. The rabbit peed all over me and I dropped my cone. I learned two things that day: rabbits pee way more then you think they do and giant flying bugs like to land in cheese dip. Oh, I forgot to mention that right after a rabbit urinated on me a giant bug flew into my cheese fry cheese dip...rendering it useless. You'd think an experience like that would turn me off to Emo's but nope.

Needless to say (which I say a lot needlessly), I had to come back to Emo's at some point during my stay in Peoria. Rachel and I hiked over and were pleased to find out that they had lemon flavored ice cream...it tasted like a girl scout cookie. I got a cherry dipped cone and some cheese fries. It was good times.