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.