Day two, and our dashboard compass is stuck on Northwest. Dammit, we're not going to Seattle!

This continues to be big fun, and Tabitha has become so well-adjusted I keep forgetting she's in the car. She accepted our new hotel room in about two seconds, and was contentedly sitting in the window looking at the parking lot when we got in tonight. But first, she had to go to Niagara Falls.

Water. Lots and lots of water.

We started the day at Niagara Falls, which we hadn't had time for yesterday. We didn't see any parking spots in the shade so we had to take Tabitha with us. She wasn't very pleased about the falls -- too noisy -- but we humans enjoyed ourselves. There's not much to say about Niagara except that it really, really is a lot of water: 75,000 gallons of water per second. In liters, that's...a lot.

Niagara Falls: done. Cross it off the list :) Moving on...

You've got a lunch in Pennsylvania

You don't spend much time in Pennsylvania on our route. We've driven this road before, in 1996, and back then we made the mistake of attempting to stop in Erie. We saw a city on the map whose name was in large-ish type and was surrounded by a lot of the yellow "lots of people live here" map color, so we thought it might be worth seeing. Wrong. I remember it as an industrial city with a drab downtown, a nudie bar called "Jigglers," and no hotel rooms under $65. In a fit of budget-motel deprivation, we dubbed it "The Buttcrack of America" and drove on to western New York. Sorry, Erie, we're skipping you entirely this time.

Pennsylvania did give us lunch, near the Ohio border. We found yet another small-town restaurant off the highway, and you know you've left the northeast US when sit-down meals, with a waitress and real metal silverware, are available for less than $5. We had a view that looked like a golf course but was actually just over-the-top landscaping with ponds, and the d