Last week, I took a mini Spring Break road trip from Chicago to Pennsylvania. I brought along my two youngest kids; Jade (16) and Luke (14) who were both with me last summer when I made a pit stop at the world’s biggest twine ball in Minnesota. I love bizarre roadside attractions and that one had been memorialized in song by the great Weird Al Yankovic, himself. This adventure would also feature Weird Al as I had VIP tickets to see him outside of Pittsburgh. It was one of the stops of his “The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour” with Emo Phillips and my tickets granted a meet and greet with the multi-Grammy winner afterward. To plan a road trip around something like this without a bunch of strange stops along the way would be downright irreverent. Our first stop was the Toledo Zoo to see their prehistoric flying reptile replicas before making our way to Cleveland to see the actual house used in A Christmas Story – fully restored to its on-screen appearance.

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