day 1 northfield to naperville

It's been a long spring.

For all of us.

So kicking off our summer road trip this early will either be a blessing or a curse. Two weeks in Ernie the van will tell.

Our first pit stop was lunch. Mac's in Wisconsin Dells serves only mac and cheese, but not your standard Velveeta variety. At Mac's you can choose from a homemade skillet full of cheeseburger mac, buffalo chicken mac, taco mac, loaded baked potato mac, classic Mac, and about a dozen other sizzling skillets full of cheeses goodness. Of course, this is the Dells we're talking about, so we weren't expecting much, but we're all pleasantly surprised (taco, loaded and classic for us in case you're wondering).

Next up was a trip to Ripley's Believe It Or Not, which I must admit was much cooler 8 years ago when we went for free. At $50 for the family, we should have bought the book - or two - or the boxed set of DVDs - or canoed down the Amazon ourselves to look for shrunken heads.

Yoda thought it was creepily cool, Punk loved the nostalgia and Kooka was disgusted by two headed everythings, and well, let's be honest - dirtiness of the place. It's kitschy and fun, but there's a reason we're at the museum instead of hunting for giant tarantulas ourselves - sweep for cripe's sake. If Ripley could afford to travel the world a'la Indiana Jones, he can surely afford a Swiffer.

Goody Goody Gumdrop claims to be the world's largest candy store and is a family tradition. Candy cigarettes for Punk (yeah they still make them, and yeah they're still gross), Zots for Kooka, and Bertie Botts Beans for Yoda.

Our stop for the night is the Marriot Convention center in Naperville, IL, just outside of Chicago, we discovered Lou Malnetti's deep dish pizza, a great hotel pool, and the Korean fish market Super H, which looks deceptively like a Cub Foods, but does indeed smell like fish even in the shampoo aisle.

P.S. Happy marriage equality. As I always tell my kids when they get old enough to ask if magic is real: Yes it is - it's called love, and with it, you can make anything happen.