It's almost 9pm Central time, and we're getting settled into our room at the Comfort Inn in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. About 500 miles and 12 hours ago, we were getting ready to leave last night's motel room in Ashland, Ohio, and we had no clear idea of where we'd stop tonight. It's all part of the adventure.
Linda has her first dialysis treatment of this trip tomorrow in Waupaca, which is about 100 miles from Fond du Lac. A few days ago, the last time I talked to the folks in Waupaca, they presented us the option of having dialysis first thing in the morning, arriving at the center at 6:30am. Although that's the time we're hoping for on the last two treatments of this trip, I didn't like the idea for tomorrow. It would have forced us to drive all the way to Waupaca today, and as you can see from the way things turned out, that would've been too much driving. So I went for the 11am arrival time instead. This way, we don't have to get up early, and if we hit the road by 9am we'll be just fine.
I planned today's travels as a three-part trip. First we traveled--more or less--the Lincoln Highway for the first 240 miles. We did 100 or so miles of the Lincoln Highway in Iowa last year and thought it would be a more interesting option than taking the interstate all the way from Ohio through Indiana to Chicago. We were a bit disappointed in the part of Highway 30--established in the 1920s as the first cross-continent highway and named after Abraham Lincoln--we drove today. We thought it would take us through a lot of small towns, much like another cross-country route, Highway 20, which is two miles from where we live. Highway 20 goes through a little town every five or ten miles. It isn't as fast as an interstate, but you get to see what places look like where people actually live.
Not so on Highway 30 going through central and western Ohio. Apparently nobody lives there, because we only got as close to a town as the highway sign pointing to the local road going to the town. All we saw were corn fields, soybean fields, and. . .well, that was about it. Way in the west of Ohio, we saw the largest array of wind turbines we've seen anywhere. We happen to find them diverting to look at, not to mention the sensible way to harness power for the future of humanity.
It was more of the same as we crossed Indiana, lots of corn and soybeans, with a few more towns within sight of the road, and eventually I-90 and the industrial eyesore of Gary and points west. Then we were on the outskirts of Chicago and Part 2 of today's plan. I didn't know how long it would take to get through Chicago, but however long I imagined it might take, it was nowhere as bad as the reality. I thought we'd get a break by traveling through Chicago on a Sunday afternoon.
But the people in charge of the roads around Chicago decided that the weekend--the entire weekend--was the best time to throttle traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway by closing two lanes. So it was that it took us more than two hours, more like two and a half, to go 20 miles from the south edge of the city to somewhere near O'Hare Airport. It was brutal, not to mention 94 degrees, but fortunately our little Toyota does not believe in overheating even when going bumper-to-bumper for more than two hours with the air conditioner on.
There's only so much you can do to get through more than two hours stuck in traffic. We tried. We listened to the last part of the White Sox game, and happened to be stuck right next to the ballpark when the game ended. Even though we heard the last out on the radio, we weren't ready for what felt like something dropping out of the sky onto the car's roof. No--it was the fireworks they set off after winning the game. Next up was music, a Bob Seger CD with a lot of favorite songs.
That didn't get us through the whole ordeal either. So we wound up having Linda read to me. Ordinarily I read to her almost every day, and we've been reading a terrific novel, the sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. We're about three-quarters of the way through and wanted to find out what happened next. Earlier in the day, just after escaping Ohio and entering Indiana, we stopped at a rest area, set our lawn chairs under a shady tree, and read for 30-40 minutes. Having Linda read to me was a treat. She did four or five pages and. . .a miracle! Traffic started moving.
It was nearly 6pm by the time we got moving and entered the third part of the plan. This called for getting to Milwaukee and stopping someplace after that. We wanted to bite off part of the drive to Waupaca, and we did accomplish that, since Fond du Lac is about 50 miles north of Milwaukee. Now it feels very good to be relaxing. Linda is stretched out on the bed and says she isn't moving until morning, when she'll write her first on-the-road blog. I don't blame her. So it was a long day but a good one. Except for getting caught in the seventh circle of Hell on the way through Chicago, everything went smoothly. We had good music, good literature, a good meal along the way, some baseball, and a comfortable room not too far from where we have to be in the morning.
And in the afternoon, Linda gets to meet my ex-wife--won't that be fun!
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