Travel, Travel and More Travel

First, let me apologize for missing last week’s post. I hadn’t encountered anything spectacular to write about, and I tried to come up with something while trying to balance a stiff work schedule, some other hobbies and getting over a trip to Chicago while at the same time preparing for another weekend trip. The result? Tuesday came and went, then Wednesday, then Thursday. By Thursday evening I was still telling myself that there had to be something interesting I’d seen, but I really didn’t believe it any more, similar to how some middle-aged men tell themselves that a sports agent will see them shooting hoops in front of their garage and sign them up to the Detroit Pistons.

Which leads us to this blog entry, where I again try to come up with something interesting about Iowa and proceed to fail yet again, because I haven’t spent any appreciable time searching for anything. Instead, I’d like to talk about travel. Specifically, car travel.

In the past four weeks, I have drive to Chicago three times. From Iowa. If you consider that each drive is about six hours, then I have driven a whopping thirty-six hours combined. I have to admit, I now have no idea how truckers do it. Yes, occasional trips to Chicago are quite nice, and the first trip was really pleasant since I avoided the tollway completely. The Illinois Tollway system doubled its prices at the start of the year, and while I’m not blind to the realities of inflation and increased costs, jacking the prices up by 100 percent is a jerk move of the highest order. I’m confident that the lion’s share of this toll increase won’t be going to maintain the roads. So I’m starting to consider it a point of honor to take a route that doesn’t leave you at the tender mercies of the Illinois Tollway, which is a lot like being at the tender mercies of a serial rapist. Actually, that’s not quite correct—at least a serial rapist understands he’s doing a bad thing.

So I drove the expressway in Wisconsin to a highway that led into Chicago where my brother lives, and while it probably did take longer, it was more direct and it was in fact interesting to witness how a few buildings started to become loosely-connected shopping centers, then finally main drags until the buildings and shopping centers and main drags coalesced into the outlying suburbs of Chicago. My brother tells me this is known as “Chicagoland” by the people who actually live in the Chicago area, but if you don’t have an intimate knowledge of the region you could be excused for calling it all “Chicago.” Let’s be honest, by now the cities and suburbs have been grafted together with housing developments and shopping centers. To call one suburb “Des Plaines” and another “Mount Prospect” has as much meaning as figuring out just where the dividing line is between indigo and purple.

The second trip to Chicago was tollway-free as well. On the other hand, it also took me through downtown Chicago and on the Dan Ryan expressway on a Friday night. I can confidently say I never would have made it through this if it weren’t for Lori, who knew her way around the city. We drove through a lot of areas in Chicago that I have strenuously tried to avoid, most notably the downtown area, and I can safely say that my little Aveo would have ended up being scraped off some SUV’s grill if it hadn’t been for her. It’s not that the entire drive was a hellish nightmare of roads designed by MC Escher, though. Lakeshore drive was fairly pleasant, and some of the residential areas were nice, if crowded on both sides due to parking. Downtown, though...I’m trying to think how I would get around there without a state-of-the-art GPS system and years of experience. It’s like trying to navigate through a labyrinth with one-way streets. And the Dan Ryan expressway was a seething mass of taillights marked by the occasional spurts of movement wherein drivers would aggressively nose their way in to different lanes. Combine that with one or two streets that require leaps of faith to make sure they are still there when you turn onto where they are supposed to be at an intersection, and you can understand my point of view that the Blues Brothers was less of a car chase movie than giving two guys who had never been to Chicago before the keys to an old police cruiser and seeing what happens.

The third trip was, quite frankly, excruciating. I brought some of it on myself by catching the midnight showing of the Avengers movie in Decorah, and completing a six-hour drive on three hours of sleep is an experience. At some point when you’re running on very little sleep, your mind starts to realize you’ve gone beyond drowsy and begins shutting down cognitive portions of your brain in order to keep your concentration on driving. This happened to my brother Andy and me a few years ago, and by the time we had gotten to my brother Jay’s Chicago condominium the portions of our brains that could think of the past and the future had been shut down, leaving us in a Zen state of existence where there was only the present moment. In each second I would tell myself what I was going to do, as in, “Now I am going to grab the toothbrush. Now I am going to open the medicine cabinet. Now I am going to grab the toothpaste. Now I will apply the toothpaste to the toothbrush. Now I will begin to brush my teeth.” It was an interesting state of mind to be in, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone make the effort to achieve it as it could cause an accident, traffic or otherwise.

This was how I entered into Chicago for the third time—faintly buzzing on caffeine, my body shaking from the vibration of driving on the road, and feeling strung out in general. By the time I had reached my brother Jay’s new apartment I was feeling like a rag that had been wrung out repeatedly. I desperately wanted to sleep, but since it was only two in the afternoon I would have to wait for a bit. Like eight hours or so. Maybe this is why I was so unwilling to make the drive back, which took a lot more out of me that it otherwise might. Perhaps part of it was that I realized I had spent a total of thirty hours in the car. Part of it might also be that I was tired of the constant drain on my mind from having to be alert all the time. Either way, I ended up getting up to stop and stretch a LOT. Perhaps not every town,  but most of them. My legs were screaming at me to move them. My body was hinting heavily that finding a motel would be an idea on the scale of discovering the theory of relativity in terms of recognizing genius. Still, I pressed on, and eventually ended up back in northeast Iowa.

This weekend, I don’t plan on travelling anywhere. No big trips, nothing involving crossing any state line. This weekend is all about resting, relaxing, and finally getting the chance to clean my bathroom, which is impossible to do if you’re in a different state than it. There’s definitely no place like home.

Unless you can rest there for a couple days, that is.