The city’s movers and shak­ers — cor­rect that, the city’s movers and shak­ers with school-age chil­dren — are mostly gone this week, leav­ing the city in the hands of the junior var­sity. It’s spring break, and around here, peo­ple don’t hang around wait­ing for the daf­fodils to make an appear­ance. They’re all on beaches through­out the warmer parts of the west­ern hemi­sphere, with a few odd skiers out in Col­orado. We, the thrifty and/or broke, look for less-expensive diver­sions to enter­tain our chil­dren on their hol­i­day. Pen­sacola? No, Michi­gan City! Yes, Indi­ana!

My neigh­bor Deb and I packed up a cooler of snacks and set three car seats abreast, then headed north and west to the shores of Lake Michi­gan, for its lures of shop­ping (big out­let mall) and nature (Indi­ana Dunes National Lakeshore). Those trav­el­ing with­out kids might throw gam­bling (Blue Chip Casino) into the mix, but when we out­lined our plan for vis­it­ing the casino — “You kids just sit here in the car, help your­self to some juice boxes and don’t talk to any secu­rity guards. Go to sleep when it gets dark and we’ll be out when we’re fin­ished.” — amus­ingly enough the kids didn’t go for it. So we did the Gap Fac­tory Out­let, Hammer’s Pasta and Pizza (avoid, fel­low trav­el­ers!), the beach, the light­house and Mt. Baldy, a very big sand dune. As hol­i­days go, it wasn’t a bad one. The kids kept the back­seat bick­er­ing to a min­i­mum and squealed very appeal­ingly as they ran bare­foot around the windy beaches. They enjoyed the div­ing duck we saw at the light­house pier and climbed Mt. Baldy with few com­plaints, which is more than you could say about the adults, who wheezed like cheap accor­dions by the halfway point. That is a HILL, I tell you. You stand at the bot­tom and say, “Oh hell, I could do that on crutches,” and then you start up, and you stop to breathe at the halfway point and say, “Well, we’re halfway there,” and then the sec­ond half is basi­cally ver­ti­cal, and it’s sand,which means one step up four steps back, but some­how you climb to the top and it’s worth it. Even with the NIPSCO cool­ing tower off there in the dis­tance. It’s Lake Michi­gan. I’m a Mid­west­ern girl, and the Great Lakes impress me.

And then home. Not a bad day. Kate got four new dresses and a tank­ini out of the deal. How did I give birth to this girly-girl, who looks for­ward to sum­mer not for the outdoor-recreation activ­i­ties but because she can wear dresses every day? When we got home she put on a fash­ion show for her daddy, twirling around to show the action of the skirt. Work it, girl. She also loves her two-piece swim­suit, which she calls “a belly stick-out.”

Life’s funny wheel: I was in Michi­gan City with my friend and neigh­bor Deb. The city used to be home to my best friend, Deb. They have lots of other things in com­mon. Strange coin­ci­dences.

The won­der­ful Jon Car­roll is back from his month­long vaca­tion, and men­tioned he’d spent part of it read­ing “Moth­er­less Brook­lyn,” by Jonathan Lethem, which I read last month, too. (I so love being in sync with my heroes.) Any­way, if you didn’t believe me when I said it was a good book, take the con­sid­ered opin­ion of this San Fran­cisco colum­nist: It pur­ports to be a hard-boiled detec­tive story, and it ful­fills all the con­ven­tions of the genre, but it has a lot more on its mind than just solv­ing mur­ders.

The hero is Lionel Ess­rog, an orphan from Brook­lyn who has Tourette’s syn­drome. The book is told from his point of view, which allows Lethem to explore Tourette’s from the inside. Lionel’s obses­sive word­play works as both char­ac­ter rev­e­la­tion and sub­text, a sort of invol­un­tary Greek cho­rus of Freudian slips, illu­mi­nat­ing the dark land­scape like flashes of light­ning.

Yeah, that’s about right.

And I’m pretty tired. Let’s con­clude this lit­tle trav­el­ogue with a see-you-tomorrow. Upload. “Once and Again.” Snore.