We got up on Wednesday, September 2nd and decided to try the hotel’s breakfast on for size. We got dressed and ready and went down to the dining room to see what they were serving in terms of the free hot breakfast they had advertised. We went inside and surprisingly there was no one around even though it was about 8am. We sat ourselves down at a table and eventually a waitress came. She told us that the there was only one meal being served and that was eggs, bacon and hash browns. That’s a nice meal for some people but we don’t eat bacon or eggs and they didn’t serve anything else.

We decided to get to steppin and we hot-footed it over to McDonald’s. We ate McDonald’s for breakfast a lot. Cheese on a biscuit with hash browns and coffee does a body good on the road, haha.

When we started driving, it took us literally ten minutes to get into Ohio. We were soclose to the border and we had no idea at all.

So Ohio, on Route 80 anyway, is full of pastures with cows, barns and wide green farms. We’ve been to Akron to visit our friend Mandy in the past so we’ve seen the more exciting parts of Ohio and trust me there are a lot of exciting parts! But just like NJ, if you base your opinion off the highways, you get a lot of misinformation. Ohio DOES have a lot of farms to be sure though.

Most of the pictures didn’t come out so hot because we didn’t stop to take pictures. We only really took them from the confines of the car. We’d been to Pennsylvania and Ohio before and weren’t really on fire to get out of the car and take any pictures.

We were more interested in getting to Indiana! Most of Indiana looked similar to Ohio. Both Ohio and Indiana only took a few hours to get through, maybe three each at most. Towards the end of Indiana we came upon the town of Gary, where Michael Jackson and the Jackson family grew up!

The houses and all the houses around it were really, really tiny. They all look like they are about the size of a room.

We didn’t go far into Gary but the houses look kind of run down. There seems to be nice houses bordering run down houses. It’s definitely an economically depressed area but there seems to be hard-working people trying to hold on to what they have there. It is a far cry from Neverland Ranch, that’s fersure.

Michael died in the end of June and this being early September, there was still a lot of interest in the media so we weren’t the only lookyloos but there wasn’t much else in the way of gifts left for MJ anymore but this:

And this hilarious memorial:

The weird thing is that this house is actually on Jackson Street. If you thought that it was named that for the family, oh you’d be mistaken. All the streets in the neighborhood are named after US Presidents and unless they re-named all of the streets to suit this one street, it is definitely a fortuitous coincidink.

It was really kind of surreal to be here. I mean, what were we doing in Indiana? What were we doing in front of Michael Jackson’s house? So weird, so cool.

A coupla titans of enterprise decided to strike while the iron was hot and rented the empty house directly across the street from MJ’s house. They turned it into a souvenir shop and allow you to tour the house so you can see what the inside is like (for a fee).

We didn’t go inside but we did do this:

So we talked to the shop owners for a hot minute and asked them how their business was doing. They cheerfully said that it was going great! They said that they were sorry that Michael had to die but that it had opened up a big opportunity for them and since someone had to make that money it might as well be them. I seriously concur and am so, so jealous.

So we were there for maybe 45 minutes or so, poking around, shopping. It was a lot of macabre fun but I do wish he hadn’t died. It wouldn’t been more fun to see it if he were still alive no doubt.

We got back on the road on our way to Chicago. I’m going to put that in a separate post.

To be continued…