Good blogday.

On Good Friday we set out for points west, the four of us in our green Sienna. Not too far west, only to Ogle County, which is still in Illinois. Not as far as the Quad Cities, but beyond the urban-suburban glop known as metro Chicago. Ogle County’s main geographic feature is the medium-sized Rock River, which gives its name to the city of Rockford further upstream, and eventually becomes one of the rivers that melds to make the Mississippi mighty.

The purpose of this trip was merely to get out of town: a microburst of travel. It may be evident by now that whenever I can spare the time and money, I go somewhere. Yuriko is of a similar inclination (but maybe not quite as avid), which is one of the factors that makes our marriage possible. People who have both time and money and who yet seldom go anywhere mystify me.

A good many years ago, I had a girlfriend who suggested that I not mention to her parents the fact that I had spent an entire summer in Europe, instead getting a job immediately after finishing university. “To them, spending a few thousand dollars going on a trip somewhere would be like going out and buying a few thousand dollars’ worth of gumballs,” she said.

I took her advice on that occasion, but I never could understand that line of thinking. It wasn’t as if they didn’t spend money on luxuries. Her father was a wealthy surgeon who seemed to have few interests, but her mother’s overriding passion was showing her poodles in dog shows, which must have cost an insane amount of money. On the other hand, perhaps I misread them. Maybe later in life, like Johnny Carson, they took a serious interest in a place like subsaharan Africa, spending some of their retirement there, learning Swahili.

Or not. In any case, no one will persuade me that money spent on travel is wasted.

Besides, the entire tab for our Good Friday outing was about $35. Well worth it, I think.

We drove west on I-88, then north on I-39, then west on Illinois 64. It's still a little early — a few weeks early — to enjoy much greenery from the road. Some plowing has been going on, but the only serious green I noticed was at a large turf farm not too many miles away from home. Mostly, though, northern Illinois is still cloaked in winterish browns and grays.

As the drive wore on, complaints began to drift forward from the back seat. “Daddy, why is the drive so far?” There’s only so much reasoning you can do with a five-year-old, and eventually I told her to be quiet and be patient, or else something serious would happen, like no computer games when we got home. But she was oddly content when I was playing a CD I borrowed from the Indian Prairie Public Library in Darien last week, “Songs That Won the War.”

Just the latest expression in a longstanding interest in World War I and World War II songs. These songs and I go back aways. When I was in elementary school, we had a couple of albums at home that were companion records to the large general (and lavishly pictorial) histories "World War I" and "World War II" published by American Heritage. These albums had voice clips — later I suppose they would be called sound bites — of both famous and more ordinary people involved in each war.

That was interesting enough, but after the voices came songs of the period. WWII didn't have as many songs as the Great War, as I recall. I was fascinated by the WWI songs especially. WWII's "Lili Marlene" was OK, but as a child I couldn't really understand what it was about. Now I realize that most of the songs on these albums were re-creations, and only clips at that. But still, I bet I was the only kid at Woodridge Elementary School who knew "Keep the Home Fires Burning," "Pack Up Your Troubles," and "Over There," among others. Some of the teachers might not have known them either.

“Songs That Won the War” includes, as the title suggests, standards of the time — the war in question being the Second World War. It includes things you would expect, such as “In the Mood,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” and a part-English version (Lale Andersen) of “Lili Marlene.” There’s also a delightful recording of Irving Berlin himself singing “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” But when I was playing this disk en route to Ogle County, Lilly said, “Play number seven.”

I took me a few seconds to understand. The CD player display shows the track numbers, of course. “You mean the seventh song on this record.”

“Number seven on the CD, Daddy.”

Which is “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” She sang along with as best as she could (ammunition isn’t in her vocabulary yet), delighted all the way through. Go figure. We listened to that track a number of times on this trip, at her request.

Tomorrow: The Eternal Indian.