Nekkid, Clueless and Feelin' Good: June 14, 2001

Thursday,
June 14, 2001

On the road again

Now that I know that I'm probably not going to roll over dead at any moment, and considering that I'm not going to get a vacation this year due to the layoffs, I decided to make this time count as vacation.

In other words, I drove up to Chicago today. Yeah, thought that might surprise you.

Actually, I didn't go all the way up to Chicago and my sister's -- I figured the best way to swing it would be to go up to Patrick's in Bloomington, stay overnight there, spend most of Friday with him wandering around and gabbing, then head up to Orland Park Friday afternoon. What I didn't count on was this massive thunderstorm system strung out all along the Midwest that day -- I skated out from under it when I left Plano, kept just ahead of it as I went east and north, and saw it roll in like purple ink twenty minutes out of Bloomington. And while I adore strong, violent weather like this, I don't really like driving in it all that much (although it's a heck of a lot easier to drive in bad weather in Illinois than it is in Texas -- at least people tend to drop down below 60 MPH when it starts pissing down).

The trip up was very nostalgic, however -- from the middle of Missouri on up I was on the route Mom used to take when we went down to Arkansas in the summer, so I recognized the Arch Motel (which now seems to be defunct -- what I wouldn't give to recover that great advertising sign), Rolla, Six Flags, Merrimac Caverns and all the other places we used to see while she was powering down to Auntie Helen's house. I always loved driving through Missouri because it was so different from Illinois -- there were these hills all over the place, and everything was so green and foresty, nothing at all like the prairie and farmlands I was used to.

St. Louis, however, was just as crowded and impossible to get through as I remembered. Of course, it didn't help that I hit the area at rush hour, but still -- there are a lot of people trying to get across the Mississippi at 5:00 pm.

And now I'm sitting at Patrick's, waiting for him to come back from the Barn so that we can chow down on some Micheleo's Pizza (real Chicago-style pizza -- I can already tell that I'll be bulging out a bit while I'm here) and gab the night away.

I already feel like I'm home.

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