Lafayette IN

Hanging out at a place called Local Mountain Coffee Cafe, which gave me 2 free hours of wireless for the mere cost of a soy latte. Hooray.

I had a great time hanging out with M and D in Chicago, I ended up spending two nights there on their futon (which was previously mine!) We did some El and bus exploring the first day, and then some of their friends came over and took us out bowling that night.

Second day was a thorough exploration of Chinatown. We ate at a place called Evergreen, which was on some street that started with a W. It focused on Cantonese and Szechuan cuisine, and the waitress seemed to know what "vegan" meant, so I was happy. I had a spicy tofu and veggie dish that was damned tasty.

My next planned stop is Ohiopyle, PA, home of the Ohiopyle state park. I'll be meeting some PPKers there and going to the Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater thing. I'll probably spend about 5 or 6 days there, since the camping is relatively cheap, and I'm a bit ahead of schedule.

At this point, I need to make a decision on what to do once the mini-gathering in PA is over. My original plan was to head towards Connecticut, visit my friend L, and we'd go up to Amherst MA to do a tour of the UMass campus there. I'm a bit hesitant to do that though, primarily because I really really really want to just go back to Portland, and I feel like I'd maybe just be wasting gas (money) by going out there and back.

I'm also partially considering it because settling down somewhere (Portland) would be a bit of return to normalcy, which I'm missing quite a bit right now. Living on the road is harder that I thought it would be, though not really from a "meeting physical needs" aspect, as the getting from place to place, and feeding myself issues haven't been a problem so far, but more in the "feeling of stability in life" aspect. I initially thought it would take me longer to get to this point to be perfectly honest, and I'm a little disappointed in myself. I'm going to give it a while longer though, to see if I can get more used to it. It's not like I'm panicking every day because I don't have a place in mind to stay each night, but it just feels unsettling to not really know where you're going to end up at the end of each day.