It’s pretty hard to turn down an invitation to an IBCA event – especially when it’s held in Paris. So, early Thursday morning Carol and I headed off to La Ville-lumière. The City of Lights.

Our first stop was the Montrose Pet Resort. I mean, how can you in good conscience put your pups in a regular old kennel when you’re going to Paris?

Once Dudley and Nellie were snuggled into their expensive suites — and the girl at the front desk had our credit card number — we pointed our car toward Indianapolis, Indiana. There is no direct route from Akron to Paris.

To save a little money, we checked into a Super 8 on Indianapolis’ garden-like south side. And it was just fine. In the morning we had a complementary breakfast in the kitchenette just off the lobby. While enjoying our coffee, orange juice and plastic bowls of our Cruncharoos, a pair of ladies from the South sat next to us. I knew they were from the South by their accents. The kind of lilting, tweedle-de-dee accents that always remind me of horribly high humidity and mosquitoes big as cats.

I heard one southern belle ask the other: “How old is your daughter now, anyway?”

“Twenty-eight,” answered the other.

“Twenty-eight?” gasped the first one. “Why, she’s the same age as my Greg Floyd!”

Now, I know folks from that part of the country like to use both first and middle names. Billy Bob. Jimmy Joe. Jerry Lee. But Greg Floyd? I think the Civil War is finally over.

Breakfast behind us, we headed for Paris: Paris, Illinois. For the International Brick Collectors’ Association’s big “Twin Lakes Brick Swap.”

Carol’s father, you see, is a paving brick collector. He has hundreds and hundreds of them. Old pavers from brickyards all over the country. Once or twice a year he goes off to some exotic city to swap bricks with his fellow collectors and collectorettes.

Driving into Terre Haute I saw a billboard pointing out that the city was the home to Clabber Girl Baking Powder. I did not know that Terre Haute was the home of Clabber Girl Baking Powder. Nor did I know what a clabber girl was. Nor exactly what baking powder did, even though from time to time I use it when recipes call for it. It is my pondering questions like these that makes me such a great travel companion.

(Clabber, I would later find out, is the thick, sour milk mixture that cooks once used to make their baked goods rise. So a clabber girl, I suppose, was the girl in charge of souring and thickening milk. But there are no longer clabber girls because baking powder — developed right there in Terre Haute in the 1840s — replaces the need for clabber. So, on to Paris!

Paris, Illinois, is a fine little farming town. The surrounding countryside is both beautiful and prosperous. Big modern farms and a bazillion acres of tall corn and golden soy. Cows, too.

We checked into the Super 8. Went to lunch at the Main Street Café. It wasn’t the greatest restaurant in the world but they did serve their tasty homemade potato chips with everything. After lunch we bought a bottle of extra strength Tylenol at the uptown drug store, and visited the antique mall and the resale shop, where I bought a book on funny old laws for 75 cents.

Then we drove out to Sandy and Tom Neal’s cabin to see their brick collection and have a picnic. It was a wonderful evening. Good food. Good people. Brick collectors are what they used to call the salt of the earth. Plain nice people. Not a mean or pretentious bone between them.

I had an especially nice chat with a man named George. He was from Knob Nostor, Missouri. He was 93. He wore a blue ball cap and suspenders with huge silver medallion buckles. When I remarked that he looked just like Harry Truman, he cackled like a hen full of grade A eggs. “People been telling me that all o’my life,” he said. He told me several time that Truman’s hometown used to hold a Truman look-alike contest and every year his family and friends would urge him to go up there and compete. But he never did. Which was probably for the better. He would have won every year and what good is a look-alike contest if the same guy wins all the time?

George, like Truman, is a Democrat. He’s ready to vote for Hillary or Obama, or any other Democrat that wins the nomination. The only Democrat he didn’t vote for was Adlai Stevenson. “I Just didn’t like him,” George said. “Neither time he ran.”

On the way back to the Super 8 we stopped at the Dairy Queen for cones.

Saturday was the big day. In the morning there was the swap meet at the Paris City Park. All the attendees – there was about a 150 of them from all over the country – backed up their cars or pickups and started trading bricks they had too many of for bricks they needed. That took about an hour. Then it was time for the big auction. Some bricks went for a hundred or more, but most brought twenty or thirty. There were other items, too, all brick related. Carol bid on an IBCA tee shirt but lost it to some other women. Carol did successfully bid on a pair of work gloves with little red brick-shaped nubs on them. The auction was a real hoot. Everyone laughed and laughed. At what I’m not exactly sure. I guess you’d have to be a brick collector to get all the inside humor.

After the auction it was time for lunch. You had to sign up weeks in advance for the bag lunches. Carol and her mom had the turkey sandwich bags. Her dad and I had the ham. The bags also included baked beans (or pasta salad), chips and a cookie. When the food was gone the crowd was gone.

(Paris is quite the convention hub, by the way. Coming up next week is the Honey Bee Festival. Week after that is the state llama show.)

On the way back to Indianapolis, we got into a horrible traffic jam in Brazil, Indiana. Seems they were having a parade. I don’t know what the occasion was, but it sure turned U.S. 40 into a parking lot. We almost got side-swiped by a fez-wearing Shriner on a tiny motor scooter.

We spent Saturday night at the same Super 8 in Indianapolis. Greg Floyd’s mother was long gone. Sunday, we headed back toward Akron on U.S. 36, a truly beautiful road. We stopped to pick up the dogs at the resort. When the girl brought them out to us, they were wearing colorful Hawaiian leis.

Trips like these are more than wonderful. They are necessary. They remind you of life’s simple blessings. They recharge you. Physically and spiritually.

Next summer’s brick meet is in Cody, Wyoming and I’m already lobbying for an invite.

Here’s Harry!