Kaleidoscipic Max

  We took a short trip this week, in honor of fall break.

  We drove from Indianapolis to Bloomington.  The colors were gorgeous Thursday, and the air properly crisp for October.
  This is the story of traveling with a young man with autism.

Downtown Bloomington

  MyGuy decided that the time had come in our very limited travel-as-a-family experiences to book two rooms.  He and i had a room with one king bed and the "boys" got the room next door, with two twins.
  Not adjoining.  Boom is very good with his brother, but i had a hard time sleeping.
  But that's jumping ahead.  Checkin time was 3.  We got to B-town, as it's called, by 10:30.

  After we found a parking garage downtown, that was just the right amount of time to be DarnGoodSoup's first customers of the day.  (It is.  Especially if you can't get enough beans, and it's worth the effort of removing them if you're not of that persuasion.)
  Our next goal, at Max's insistence, was to find the downtown mall with the red phone booth.  A couple of years back, i'd gone with MyGuy's parents & sister and we'd found this place.  Max is an Anglophile, and this was something he'd really wanted to see.
  i thought it might not be possible, what with not having paid sufficient attention at the time and the way phone booths are disappearing.  But there it was.

  Way cool.  Way too cool shopping too, but that's for another trip.
  Next, the reason for the trip, was

Wonderlab.

  Max wasn't too sure he wanted to visit the museum. He wanted to go home.  But we got him inside, and informed him that he would stay with us, so the rest of us could look at the exhibits, not just race through.  (That's often a problem: he can go everywhere in Indianapolis' Children's Museum in 20 minutes, an interesting place to take a power walk.)

My profile photo was taken at the water balls - and they improved the exhibit since then.

Strobe Bubbles

  But we actually had a fun time there.  Max truly observed several exhibits, a few just to humor us, it's true, but some he really got into.  Honestly, we spent longer than at the one at home, maybe less overwhelming.

Afterwards

  After swimming at the hotel and dinner at Pizza Hut, i designed homework questions to review the day.  Parts of it he was a little confused about: he chose "2 days" as how long it took to get to Bloomington, not 2 hours (maybe the total time of the trip?).  And while he answered verbally, "enjoyed the exhibits," the choice he circled was "ran through the museum," which he may have wanted to do but truly did not.  

  And his favorite exhibit?  The kaleidoscope maker.  Way cool.