13 The Second Cipher

Chapter 13 The Second Cipher "Where were you kids?" Dr. McDonald asked anxiously when the twins came running back to the RV in the parking lot. "Your mother and I have been looking all over for you." Pep turned to her brother. "We were playing Frisbee," he explained. "Pep chucked it into the woods, and we had to go look for it. She totally can't throw." "You can't catch!" his sister complained. "Can too." "Can not." Dr. McDonald preferred to avoid arguments, especially the can too–can not variety. He opened his road atlas and flipped to the map of Nevada.

"Well, thank goodness you're safe!" Mrs. McDonald told the twins, reaching for her purse. "Five more minutes and we were going to call the police. Here, I bought you each a souvenir." "Let me guess," Coke said. "Yo-yos?" "How did you know?" Mrs. McDonald asked. "I'm a genius." Mrs. McDonald took two new yo-yos out of her purse: a red one for Coke and a blue one for Pep. "Awesome!" Coke said. "Wanna see me walk the dog?" "Maybe later," Mrs. McDonald replied. "Let's blow this pop stand." "Mom," Pep said, "I wish you wouldn't buy this stuff. You're wasting your hard-earned money." "Yeah, money doesn't grow on trees, Mom," Coke said as he tried to duplicate a yo-yo trick he had seen on the video. "But you've got to bring home souvenirs!"

Mrs. McDonald told them. "That's part of the fun of traveling!" She passed around sandwiches she had made while the twins were in the woods. Dr. McDonald started the RV and pulled out of the parking lot. After driving a little Honda for years, he wasn't used to such a big vehicle, and he backed out carefully. Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/). Click Get Directions. In the A box, type Wendover UT. In the B box, type Evanston WY. Click Get Directions. As he pulled onto Route 70 South, he relaxed a bit and began humming the old Willie Nelson song "On the Road Again." It wasn't long before they had merged back onto I-80, heading east. "I was looking at the map," Dr. McDonald told the family after they had been on the road for a while. "Lake Tahoe is only about an hour from here. That might be a good place for us to

stop for the night. Maybe we can even stay for a day or two. We could go swimming or kayaking. Have some fun, you know? Lake Tahoe is beautiful." "No!" Pep shouted. "We want to go see the largest ball of twine in the world!" shouted Coke. "Yeah," Pep added. "Lakes are a big bore." Mrs. McDonald turned around in the front seat. "Wait a minute," she said. "Yesterday everybody was making fun of me for wanting to go see the largest ball of twine in the world. And now you're all anxious to get there. What's going on?" "Yeah," Dr. McDonald said. "Why are you suddenly so interested in that silly ball of twine?" As usual, Pep looked to Coke for the answer. She wasn't about to tell her parents that there would be some sort of attack at the ball of twine and that they had to help stop it.

Coke thought fast. "We're twins," he announced. "And twine is twin with an e at the end. So we want to see it." "That's ridiculous!" Dr. McDonald sputtered. "So instead of swimming and kayaking on a beautiful lake, you want to go look at a ball of twine because it has an E in it?" "Yes!" the twins agreed. "You wouldn't understand," Pep said. "You're not a twin." "Well, I'm pleased to see you kids are getting into the spirit of the trip," Mrs. McDonald said. "The twine ball is in Cawker City, Kansas." "Then that's where we want to go," Coke declared. "We hate swimming and kayaking." "Since when?" his father asked. "You used to love swimming and kayaking when you were little." "Please, please, please, please?" begged Pep. Dr. McDonald could not resist a child with puppy dog eyes, especially when it was his own. He sighed when the exit for Lake Tahoe

appeared on the side of the road, and he drove right by it. Mrs. McDonald passed her laptop back to the kids so they could see the route to Kansas. The McDonalds would have to drive along I-80 all the way across Nevada, through the top of Utah, across the southern part of Wyoming, and halfway across Nebraska before detouring south into Kansas. "It says Cawker City is 1,414 miles from here," Mrs. McDonald informed the family, "and today is June nineteenth. It should take us a few days to get there, depending on how often we stop." "Speaking of which, I'm beat," Dr. McDonald announced. "Let's start looking for a campground." About ten miles from the Nevada border,