Into the cold, cold northland -- March 20th -- Day 8

After doing laundry at our hotel (it was somewhat satisfying to leave our dirt in Ohio) we resumed our northward trek, and it was readily apparent why the wind was blowing so hard--the landscape is so flat that there is nothing to stop it! One of the ways we have been entertaining ourselves while driving is to listen to audio books, and by this time we were well into Prague Winter, Madeleine Albright's stories of the fate of her Jewish family members in Czechoslovakia set in the context of the decade between 1938 and 1948. It's a fascinating book full of many details about the Nazi invasion and occupation, as well as gut-wrenching stories of individual relatives and their fate at the hand of Hitler and his minions. Most of these stories had not been known to her until she started researching and one can only imagine how difficult it must have been for her to read the original sources, craft them into the book, and then again read them for the audio book. We stopped for lunch at a German restaurant in a part of Columbus, Ohio known as Germantown and no, the irony was not lost on us as we moved ahead to Albright's next chapter. Although we had made a hotel reservation Auburn Hills, near the basketball tournament site, we decided to go first to Ann Arbor, which took us about an hour off of the most direct route. We arrived in Ann Arbor on the first day of spring to find a high of 22 (according to the Weatherchannel.com it felt like 12) and snow flurries. Hearing on the radio that the temperature had been in the 60s on the same date a year earlier provided little solace. While we had anticipated cold, we did not anticipate this level of coldness, so the first stop after dinner was the largest purveyor of Wolverine paraphernalia where Max purchased a new hat to ward off the cold.