7-8 Sept. 2010
Following last night’s shenanigans is today’s catatonia, trance-like dreamy driving whirring up windblown Indiana highways. It’s a long drive from Lebanon to Verona, a blurry 689 miles north using a route I manually, of course, navigated (see leg notes below)… which turned out to be a much slower tour of small Wisconsin towns and an embarrassing Taco Bell dinner… if I haven’t mentioned it yet, I don’t support conglomerate consumerism… but under dire circumstances such as bulk Gatorade buying from Walmart or cramping hunger pains followed by cramping poor quality food pains from Taco Bell.
Food: my budget, although minimal, is enough to support dirty diner restaurants owned by moms and pops so I’ve tried to find places that looked the part. Waffle House, I’ll agree was not one of those types of places, however, it was recommended beings I had never tried it before. Other sources come from my hosts; I am gratefully often invited to eat with the family. Precarious traveling/not wanting to lose time stopping due to my undesirable lack of time has many times led me to also exploit cheap Walmart food prices, buying all types of mixed nuts and bananas in bulk to stave off hunger instead of stopping for lunch. Strange as it may seem, sitting in a car all day and eating healthy nuts has caused me to gain weight, something that I previously have never experienced. I am worried that this trip may be messing up my metabolism as I have now gained 8 to 10 pounds.
I feel I must also mention me secret to staying awake and alert even after nights like last: sunflower seeds. I don’t have a favorite brand and I change up the flavor to give my taste buds a variety. I owe them my life.
On approach from the south, the Windy City is an impressive growing wall of towers off in the distance. The commuter train runs along the I-90 North and you see the commuters waiting at each station entering or escaping the massive steel peaks. I was arriving just after the rush hour I didn’t know if I’d be rushing off to escape anywhere swiftly so I decided the slow entrance would afford me good video time and I began to film, unfortunately my battery ran out and I have next to nothing close up of the city. The images ingrained in my memory of the giant metropolis’s skyline are of a mixture of modern steel frames with crystallized shells of obsidian black or a nacreous green that reach higher than any other US city and more classic monolithic stone blocks carved as statues into a sapphire Lake Michigan backdrop.
8 Sept. 2010
I returned to Chicago to drop my host off at the airport. I thought it would afford me an equally impressive and photo-filled approach; however, Chicago O’Hare airport lies on the northwest side of the city which was the direction from which I entered coming from Verona, Wisconsin. Suffice it to say that I didn’t catch the loop and see the art, which I’d heard so much about. I didn’t have my gin & tonic and jazz, my bourbon and blues, or my hops and soul in the ‘Second City.’ Instead, I left it heading west again for the long jaunt across the prairie air, but not without the promise to myself that I’d make it back here to fulfill my desires, like compare Chicago style pizza to that of New York.
If time now flies, I hope it does so across the plains as well.
.s.
(pictures missing, probably on memory card left in Miami)
