Blogging from the Windy City!
So I deleted the first post…so what? It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want to!
I’m in Chicago all this week, attending the McCrone Research Institute’s Forensic Polarized Light Microscopy class. Yeah, you try and say it fast. Anyway, this is supposed to be a graduate level microscope class all condensed down to one week of headache inducing, neck straining, contact lens blurring fun. Yay for me! I’ll post on the particulars of each day’s fun, almost right as it’s happening…well, after I get some dinner that day, anyway.
So I drove up to Chicago from Lexington (that’s SC, not KY). According to Garmin, 810.3 miles, took me 12 hours, 26 minutes total. I stopped for a total of 1 hour 17 minutes, giving me a driving total of 11:08. I averaged about 65.2 mph overall, and about 72.7 mph for my “moving” average. Not too bad, I think. So in approximately 19 years of legal driving, I can count the number of deer I’ve seen on the road (including the stupid one I tagged in ’05) on one hand. Well, I could until today! I saw at least 5 deer on my side of the road, alive and grazing, before I got to Spartanburg. I saw a pair and a three-some, about 10 miles apart, and it scared the crap outta me! None of them even moved toward the road, but they all looked up as the El Rakeman Express came rolling through. Oh, I forgot to mention that I left at 4:30 AM! So all these deer were seen before 5:30 am, as I tend not to waste time on the highway. In addition to the grazing herbivores, a medium sized cat tried to commit suicide-by-Rakeman…I say tried, because he got ½ of the way across the road, headed toward my wheels, when he thought better of it and saved 8 of his 9 lives by going back. There’s no coming back when you get struck by the Blue Streak. I made my way through South Carolina and some of North Carolina in the dark. Since I’ve seen the I-26 stretch that moves through SC from Charleston to Spartanburg, I wasn’t too disappointed. The piece through NC and Tennessee was very pretty, even in the misty gray dawn. There was almost no traffic to speak of, and I only saw ONE trooper through both states…and there wasn’t even anyone inside the vehicle, just an SUV on the side of the road. In fact, I didn’t see any highway patrol until Indiana, and they were all on the other side of the highway.
I came up thru TN and Kentucky, where the grass was really green, but not blue. Plenty of horse farms, once I got through Lexington. I made the turn north in Louisville, and entered Indiana. Wow. That has got to be the most boring stretch of interstate this side of the Mississippi. I saw a wreck on the Chicago side of Indianapolis which highlighted the necessity of cable barriers…sedan vs. minivan, with the sedan going thru the median and stopping in the oncoming traffic lanes. Nice.
At least the drivers were decent. If someone was moving fast, the folks in the number one lane (fast) moved over and let them past. Since I-65 is almost all 2 lanes, it was a nice change to be able to go 78 mph, rather than 60 like on I-95. Which is also 2 lanes, but is so chock full of DBs and DAs, that there’s no way to even approach the speed limit. If you can’t figure out what a DB is, use your imagination…what sound does a water truck make when it collides with a vinegar truck? As for DA….I’d rather be a smart one than a dumb one…
So Indiana was flat and boring. There was major construction going into Gary, which stinks just a tiny bit worse than Pasadena, TX, but as I made the turn onto the detour my Garmin said, “Recalculating!”, and proceeded to tell me how to get the crap outta where I was. Not that I was panicking or anything, since I knew where I was. Yep, I can read signs…even the ones that are clustered together with 18 other ones listing how to get back to where you want to be. But it was nice to not have to double check the paper map, and to listen to that sweet voice of reason…my (wife’s) Garmin GPS…Awsome!
As I made the huge loop that was my detour, I entered onto I-90…the DA toll road that leads into Chicago. You’d think with all the traffic on it, it would have paid for itself by now, but nooooo. Right after I got on the Dan Ryan Expressway (yeah right!), the traffic thickened. And all those people that were good drivers must have continued onto Wisconsin or Detroit, cuz they weren’t with me! Luckily, the Voice of Reason was there to help me. “Exit right…stay right…turn left…arriving at destination!” Once again, awesome! I love GPS. What did we do without them…oh that’s right, we waited until our kids were old enough to read, then we gave them a map and asked, “We’re at mile marker 75, how long until we get to….” Oh, wait…maybe that was just my family. At least I learned how to read an interstate map. It’s all good.
Since I’m on Central time now, I can stay up an hour later! Not likely, as 12 hours in the Blue Streak has just about worn me out. Now I get to look forward to 9 hours of microscope. Once again, yay for me. I’ll put some stuff up tomorrow after class, and I’m going to try and hit up Wrigley Field for the Cubs v. Mets game tomorrow. Which will also be my first ride on a subway. Not the sandwich. Oh well.
No comments:
Post a Comment