September 3. Here’s Grace and the car at the start of our first full day on the trip, in the parking lot of our lovely accommodations in New Stanton, PA. Note the green bookcase… still there. You can get the sense of how tightly packed the car was. Every time we opened any door, loose hangers flew out. Not sure it was necessary to bring plastic hangers that cost 99 cents a dozen, but hey, you pick your battles.
Grace had never been to Chicago, one of my favorite cities, so my plan was to break up the early part of the trip with a day and a night there. First, we had to get through the rest of Pennsylvania and all of Indiana.
It was along this stretch that I got on the phone to Audible. I confessed to the guy on the phone that I had been paying $14.95 per month for quite some time, yet I had never listened to a single book. Nor could I remember my password. Nor could I figure out which email address it was tied to. And when I did, I couldn’t remember the password to that email address. The patient fellow spent a good 45 minutes with me straightening this out, and by the end of the call I was all set with 18 book credits.
So what did we listen to? I was traveling with a Millenial, and what do they turn to for comfort? Why, Harry Potter, of course. We started in on Book 1 on the way to Chicago.
Also on this stretch, one of my two bags of reading material got drenched by Grace’s leaking water bottle, which made for less than ideal reading conditions. All the more reason to listen to Harry Potter.
In my quest to get a photo in each state, Indiana was a Fail because I took the picture only when I realized that we were about to cross the border leaving the state without getting the requisite shot. So this is a sad tribute to Indiana, which was green and lovely this time of year. (Wait til you see the crappy picture we have of Nevada, after which this one will look like a jewel. And I didn’t care about Pennsylvania, because I work in that state and don’t really need to document our journey through it.}
But Chicago! Yay. I’ve been to Chicago many times for business yet have never had time to enjoy it. I’d booked a hotel right on Wacker Drive so we would be in the thick of things. Plus, I figured the packed car would be safer if valet-parked at a decent hotel. We ran into a little glitch right off the bat when we pulled up to the hotel: It seemed that with the bookcase on top of the car, we would be VERY snug fitting into the hotel garage. No problem, the valet assured us when we checked later – they had driven the car in carefully and all was well. So off we went.
View from our (teensy) hotel room:
Grabbing a beer and a snack on Wacker Drive:
Lucky us, the weather in Chicago was spectacular. We strolled to the Navy Pier and drank Margaritas at the base of the Ferris Wheel.
Then we walked along that street whose name I keep screwing up. The Miracle Mile? the Miraculous Mile?
…followed by a flight of Chardonnay and a light dinner. Truth be told, we had a big bicker around now (possibly because of the beer, the margaritas, then the wine??) but you wouldn’t know it from this photo. Grace and I go back a ways (as in, her whole life), and we’ve also traveled together a lot. We’ve learned to recover pretty quickly from our fights.