Day 7: Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Indianapolis, Indiana and environs

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I don't linger particularly long in Illinois because I have learned that my Father has been hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat. It somehow seems fortuitous that I just happen to have driven 2000 miles to arrive in Indianapolis the night after he's admitted.

On Wednesday morning, my Mom and I go over to the hospital to pay him a visit. It's a Catholic hospital, which accounts for the statue of St. Francis out front.

Inside, my Dad looks about as healthy as anyone in a hospital can be. I stick around for about an hour, visiting with him and my Mom, as a continuous stream of nurses, doctors and attendants stops by to chat with my Dad. I conclude after awhile that his hospital room is a lot nicer than most of the hotel rooms I've stayed in on the way there.

Before it gets too late, though, I head down to Bloomington for one last visit to the little college town that I called home for three years. I'm ostensibly going there to close down the last remnants of my old bank account (I could use the cash), but I have enough time afterwards to meet up with my old friend, Becca, for a game of frisbee in the park.

That doesn't last very long, so I eat dinner and then decide to pay an impromptu visit to the house I lived in my last year there. I discover that my friends Bryan and Brianna--whom I rented the house from--just happen to be home. I haven't seen them in two years, so I step inside to talk with them for awhile. We start out by catching up on the vagaries of our respective existences--they've both become Ph.Ds in the past month--before drifting off into discussions of road trip theory. They're planning a road trip west in the next few weeks, and I try to encourage them to head towards the places in the desert southwest that I've come to know and love but still haven't seen enough of.

After awhile, I bid farewell to Bryan and Brianna and go down to the old Karst Farm Park, so that I can take part in yet another game of frisbee with Becca. This time, we fill in as subs for a team--which neither of us knows--that has only six players and is competing in the end-of-season Spring League "chumpionship". We lose the game by four points--effectively condemning our temporary friends to a last place finish in the league--and "celebrate" afterwards by going on a late-night ice cream run to the Chocolate Moose downtown.

I leave my camera behind for all of this, taking a break from the photographic compulsions that always seem to follow me around the country. I've taken enough pictures of Bloomington in my life as it is, and, for once, I feel like I won't need to come back to visit anytime soon.

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