Joy and David

The occasion for this trip and mini-family reunion is Joy and David's move to Madison to complete their professional formation as veterinarians. Joy is doing a residency in neurology at the university and David has been accepted into the doctoral program there. So they will be there a while but everyone has always told me how great Madison is, so why wait?

It's probably been an adjustment for them since the first two years after Joy's graduation from vet school were spent in California, in Davis and San Diego, as David did his residency in pathology. It will be interesting to see how they've adjusted. Joy is more familiar with the Midwest in general and knows Wisconsin fairly well from visits to her grandparents' cabin there.

We went out to Manhattan, Kan. for their wedding reception (the actual marriage was performed in California without much ceremony) and Joy's graduation three years ago. It will be great to catch up with them.

I actually had a hand in helping Joy arrange an "externship" at the North Carolina zoo while she was in vet school. A guy I shared an office suite with while working for Newsdesk was a consultant for the zoo and recommended her to the director there. So we got a chance to combine a visit with Joy and with Andrea's niece Marcia in North Carolina that summer.

Volvo XC70

When this all-wheel drive version of the Volvo station wagon first came on the market it had "Cross Country" stenciled on the rear bumper and it is the ideal car for a cross-country road trip. Sitting high off the ground on big balloon tires, it is very comfortable for long trips thanks to the great engineering and the super-padded seats.

I leased it in 2008 and we have taken it on two long road trips -- to Santa Fe in 2008 and Wichita in 2010. The AWD was handy on some of the gravel roads to our friends' house in Tesuque as well as on some unpaved stretches of the historic Route 66 that we followed on the way back. The cargo area makes a comfortable traveling cabin for Ziggy, with room for all her paraphernalia (travel crate, food, toys, dishes). The station wagon is actually longer than most SUVs, stretching out the cargo area for Ziggy's riding pleasure. Our luggage and the cooler take up the back seat. Given the great original purchase price and the low interest on the lease, the buy option was very attractive once the lease expired, so it was a no-brainer to stick with it.

When I lived in Berlin, two American friends of mine, John Tagliabue and David Marwell, both had black Volvo station wagons. This struck me as odd because the car seemed stodgy and clunky and neither of them were. Once when I drove a Volvo of that period it seemed to handle like a tank, safe but stiff. In the meantime, I have changed, and so has Volvo. It has spiffier styling and better handling while retaining the strength and endurance it is famous for. When I was test-driving cars, the Volvo was far and away superior in every respect to the two other leading candidates -- a Passat station wagon and a Subaru Outback or Forester. By the time Martens made me a price, it was not even prohibitively more expensive.

I had a BMW 325i in Berlin, when I was looking down on my Volvo driver friends, and it was a great car. It took me on a six-week super-road trip through northern Europe when I was researching my book The New Superregions of Europe. I went by ferry from Travemunde across the Baltic to Helsinki, drove around southern Finland, then took another ferry from western Finland to Stockholm, drove around southern Sweden and then drove to Norway, embarking in Bergen for a ferry across the North Sea to explore Britain and Ireland, and a final ferry from England to Hamburg. The BMW managed very well, even on the wrong side of the road, and was always fun to drive.

But the Volvo is great for traveling with the dog. It doesn't have GPS but it does have the outlet to plug our iPhones into the stereo system. The moon roof opens up for scenic driving in good weather. Mileage? Well, it's not a Prius, but we'll spend a good deal less on gas than we would on air fare to Europe.

Say cheese

One of the great things about traveling is discovering local cuisines. With the new emphasis in the U.S. on local production and the rediscovery of artisanal traditions in everything from chicken-raising to craft brewing, a road trip is bound to yield some nice surprises.

Wisconsin is of course famous as a dairy state and a leading producer of commercial cheese. It occurred to me that it would also be fertile ground for artisan cheeses, and sure enough a little googling produced a promising array of cheese producers and markets.

For instance, right in the heart of Madison, on Capitol Square, is a store called Fromagination, a nice pun on the French word for cheese and a store that looks on its website a lot like Neal's Yard in London. There is also something called the Wisconsin Dairy Artisan Network with lists of stores and producers.

We both like cheese a lot (for that matter, all three of us like cheese). Part of our travel equipment is a cooler, which is essential to keep open cans of dog food, limes for our gin and tonics (gin is another part of our travel equipment), picnic lunches, and so on. Our motel rooms generally have fridges for re-freezing our ice packs. In short, we are ready to load up on some cheese.

I discovered in France that cheese often tastes best right where it is made. Even short travel somehow disturbs the product, or perhaps it's just that you get the best, ripest cheeses on the spot. In any case, Pont L'Eveque never tasted so good as it did right in Pont L'Eveque, and local camemberts in Normandy always had an extra nuttiness.

Wisconsin is the center for much of our commercial cheese production -- those unappetizing pre-sliced concoctions wrapped in cellophane. And if artisan cheesemakers are working only with pasteurized milk, it will limit how much flavor they can give their products. But there's every reason to hope that we will be eating a lot of good cheese during our trip.

Mobile-ized

This will be our first trip fully equipped with mobile devices -- iPhones, iPad, laptop. In the 2010 trip, Andrea's BlackBerry proved very useful in finding restaurants, booking motels along the way and the other things that a smartphone can do.

This year, we both have iPhones, which are of course even more versatile. The Volvo does not have GPS but the phones will navigate us through whatever local maps we need. Instead of feeding CDs into the radio for audiobooks, we have downloaded several books on audible.com to listen to on longer stretches of driving. We don't have to worry about carrying along an extra camera to take photos. For music, we have Pandora or the iPods on the phones.

My iPad, when combined with the Bluetooth keyboard, is a mini-laptop, and will be handy for emails, blogging (!), and Web surfing along the way. The Kindle app will probably provide all the reading material I need. In addition, Andrea is bringing her laptop.

We have not completely made the transition. I will still rely on the road atlas for long-distance planning and connections after having printed out the basic route from Google maps. In my last post, I mentioned the print guides we rely on during our road trips. I may take along a couple of print books just for old times' sake.

I've looked at some of the road trip apps for finding cheap gas, calculating your gas mileage, etc. but it's a little too much bookkeeping for my taste and since we're not on a student budget we will probably live without.

Planning a road trip

The genesis of this trip was Joy and David's move to Madison for at least a couple of years for Joy to do her veterinary residence/internship at the university. Andrea and I love our road trips with Ziggy and Darras and Gina are always game to go somewhere in the RV. As cyclists, they also thought the rail trails in Wisconsin would be fun to ride.

The backbone of our road trips has been the scenic tours described in The Most Scenic Drives in America. In this case, we will drive straight to Madison and spend several days in that area before heading north. A Wisconsin friend here in Washington recommended Door County, and that corresponds to scenic tour #59 in the book. I'd read a mystery set in Paradise, Mich., A Cold Day in Paradise, so the Upper Peninsula had some appeal and that corresponds to #61. We will cross the Mackinac Bridge, probably spend some time on Mackinac Island, and then, if we have the time, embark on #62 in the west along the coast of Lake Michigan or #63 in the east along the coast of Lake Huron. Then back home.

The two other essential guides for our road trips are AAA's Traveling with Your Pet, which is updated every year and lists the AAA-rated places that take pets, and Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood, which is also updated periodically. The AAA book has proven to be very reliable, and tells you not only the people amenities but useful things like whether there are interior or exterior corridors (as anyone who has traveled with a dog can tell you, exterior corridors are generally preferable). I found our Madison B&B, The Speckled Hen, by googling, however, since the AAA book is largely confined to chains. The B&B has only one room for guests with pets so I booked it very early.

Andrea swears by Roadfood because it was such a good companion for her back in the days when she was making cross-country trips to California and back. I certainly like all the barbecue, fried chicken and hamburger places they list, but I find their focus excessively narrow in defining American cuisine and what makes for a good stop on a road trip. Especially now, with so many places trying to serve fresh and local ingredients, the Sterns approach seems dated and a bit out of step. Nonetheless, it has some good tips and we don't leave home without it.

Of course, with apps like Around Me and Yelp and Zagat we'll have a lot of other ways to find places to eat while we're under way. For instance, I found L'Etoile in Madison simply by googling "best French restaurant Madison".

Road trip!

We love road trips and this summer we will be heading to Madison, Wis. to visit my niece, who is doing her veterinary residence at the university there, and her husband. We will rendezvous with my brother and the rest of his family there, spend a few days together in Madison and the Wisconsin Dells and then head up to Door County and the Upper Peninsula before coming across the Mackinac Bridge and heading home.

We will drive along Lake Erie on the way from Washington and will explore the coasts on Lake Michigan, Lake Superior and Lake Huron on our trip, so it is truly a Great Lakes Road Trip. I went to Oshkosh in college but all I can remember is that it stormed. I've been to Chicago a few times but that is really it for my exposure to the Great Lakes.

One of the pleasures of a road trip is taking Ziggy along with us. She has been on two previous long trips with us, out to Santa Fe in the summer of 2008 and to Wichita in the summer of 2010. She rides in the back of the Volvo and we find places to stay that are pet friendly.

Departure is planned for about 1 p.m. on Thursday, July 12 and the return on Sunday, July 22. Because of the difficulty in getting hotels in some of these places during the summer vacation I've had to book lodging for our first seven nights already.

For the family reunion in Madison, we will be joining Joy and David, who live there; my brother Darras and his wife, Gina; Amy, his oldest daughter, and her husband, Fletcher; and hopefully Dani, Darras's youngest daughter. We've booked a table at L'Etoile in Madison to celebrate Quatorze Juillet, since most everyone in my family has a French connection. Darras worked at the Herald Tribune; I spent 11 years in Paris; and Amy and Joy spent all or part of junior year in Aix.