So far, I have been in California, Oregon, Arizona, Alaska, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and now Iowa.

As we left Port Clinton, Ohio, it began to rain. The dog was shivering from the pounding noise. The cat was meowing like all Karzahni broke loose. A nuclear power plant smoked in the distance, white steam mixing with the cirrus carpet that hung many miles above us. Our destination was Des Moines. Our mileage was 740 total.

To lighten the mood, I played "Rain" on my MP3 player, but it ironically stopped raining after a minute of the droning Beatles song. We drove into a lovely spot called Oak Harbor, by far the nicest part of Ohio we had been through yet. All the houses were tiny and built in the '60s. The lady observed that the reason was because the world in the Swingin' Sixties was far less materialistic. Perhaps the people preferred to hallucinate their desired possessions.

At 11:30, we arrived in the state of Indiana. (What the heck is a hoosier?) At 12:26, we stopped at the McDonalds Travel Plaza, where I had a foot-long and a white-chocolate-covered Rice Krispies treat, in which they used margarine instead of the real thing. My mother wore outrageous clothing --a pink shirt with pajama bottoms. Yes, she was underderssed for the McDonalds Travel Plaza in Indiana.

As we left the boring state of Indiana, we noticed advertisements for very high-class things. Discount Cigarette Outlet... Fireworks... HIV testing... Free Pregnancy Tests... Texas Poker and Card Table... Gentleman's Club... Dolls, Open 7 Days a Week... The welcome sign was a toilet bowl saying, "Can't Hold It?"

At 2:45, we entered the state of Illinois, the "Land of Lincoln." Our mileage was 992. We got to 1,000 a few minutes later.

Right outside of Joliet, which my mother pronounced "Juliet," we encountered a huge moving truck that had gone right off I-80 and had split in half, the packed possessions sprawled out pell-mell all over the roadside. My mother panicked and called an insurance company, who tried to shaft us on it. We decided we weren't going to get insurance because we didn't need it.

Illinois was just as ugly as Ohio, although there were many flocks of birds. Huge flocks that clustered together, black clouds that spread over the skies like crebain waiting to report back to their master. These flocks consited of thousands of tiny black birds and could stretch to quarter of a mile in length.

4:25. We spotted a Dairy Queen and a Subway: dinner. Interestingly enough, none of us wanted Dairy Queen badly enough, as we had filled up at Subway. The teenage worker had tried to put cheese on my chicken teriyaki sub, which is like putting a reuben on white bread. This was actually our first Subway dinner.

5:37. We entered Iowa, which was full of hundreds of miles of dried-up corn. There were many shining spotlights of the sun shining through the dense clouds, like the divine spotlights so often seen in cartoons. The sun created an eerie, Dali-esque effect when shining through the varying density of the depressing cloud bank. The bird clouds were stretching to half a mile now and a tenth of a mile in width, easy to mistake for a tornado except black.

We couldn't find a Best Western in Iowa that took pets that was in our range, so we booked a Holiday Inn. This was the best decision either of my parents ever made.

The Holiday Inn, which was in Iowa City, had a beautiful waterpark, but then again, all waterparks are beautiful. There was a weird contraption that filled with water and cascaded hundreds of gallons of liquid every few minutes, soaking the screaming little kids below. There was also a millrace (a race across mats on chains that shift with the flow of the water, making it very unpredictable.) I only got across the millrace once. A few never made it, no matter how hard they tried, but it was funniest with the slender gymnastics girls who thought they could race across tiptoe in five seconds and fell in, screaming, on the third mat. I had to get on all fours to cross it.

But most impressive of all was a great big waterslide, hundreds of feet of tube with rushing water. Actually, there were two: a fast one and a slower one. I had no idea what was coming, so I got cold feet and went back in the pool. Today, I'll try to tackle it. I've got a four-dollar bribe.

I am actally writing in the morning at this beautiful hotel. I would like to spend a day here, but I know we can't on some charge or another. My father is impatiently bellowing at me like a bull while reading his motorcycle magazine. So that means bye.