Maybe I shouldn’t have complained about having nothing to write about. I’m typing this in the Crowne Plaza hotel in western Omaha. We left Lincoln a day early and added a day to our hotel stay, thanks to various alerts about a winter storm that meteorologists expect to roll through for the next three days. Earlier today, we woke up to freezing rain, and the weather promises more freezing rain today, followed by six inches of snow and high winds tomorrow. It should all be over by Friday (Christmas), so with luck our plans to head to Vermillion on Saturday are still on.
Right now, the rain has let up a bit and the temperatures have risen above freezing, so the trip on the Interstate went without incident. The roads were sloppy, but not slippery. And the Crowne Plaza is a good place to hold up for the next three days, I think. There’s a pool, and a complementary shuttle connecting us to various restaurants and stores within a five mile radius. We also seem to be practically the only people in the hotel. The parking lot is next to empty.
I need to make a correction to my post about various American oddities. The thing about there being no baby change tables in the mens’ rooms might be restricted to states like Michigan and Illinois for reasons I don’t really know about. We’ve had far better luck with change tables in mens rooms in Iowa, Nebraska and, as I now recall, a McDonald’s in South Dakota. Possibly these establishments were newer.
And, on our trip, Erin and I talked about Sorrow’s Knot and Icarus Down (we’re writers. We do thinks like that during car trips; it probably drives the kids mad). We’re both working through tricky patches in our stories, and I hope I helped Erin work through her pacing issue. As for her, she gave me a few ideas and a few challenges about Icarus Down, that I will write about next post.
Right now, it’s late, and I should get to bed.