My birthday is coming up soon, and I had made plans to go visit my family in Illinois. It has kind of become tradition with us over the last few years. I spend two days trying to relax while my niece pulls out every toy she has for us to play with. She also likes to pick out my birthday cake. However, given that she is only 4 years old, my cakes tend to always have pictures of Dora the Explorer or Yo Gabba Gabba on them. Which is fine. All I really care about is the trying to relax part, and for me that starts with the drive.I love driving. It gives my mind a chance to wander and create things. Normally by the end of my two and a half hour journey, I will have listened to a bunch of new songs or podcasts and came up with a few new blog post ideas. My drive out of Wisconsin went fine. It wasn't until I crossed the border into Illinois that I began to question if God might be up there going, "Okay, now let's see what he does when this happens."
Literally the moment I crossed into Illinois, I was greeted by what seemed like a never ending field of construction cones. At the time I was like, oh well, whatever, I figured it would eventually clear up...but, it never did. I have never seen road construction go on for so long. It was like the state of Illinois has lost a game of 'Horse', and now it was picking up it's roads and going away.
Oh wait, my apologies, there was a half hour stretch when there was no road construction. Of course, that was only because for that half hour I was blindly navigating some stupid occasionally labeled detour. Yeah, a detour is exactly what I wanted when I was already running low on fuel.
The detour was worth it, because it took me through a lot of scenic places that I had never seen before...is what I would like to say, but I would be 100% lying. The only scenery I encountered were corn fields. Corn fields to my left. Corn fields to my right. And sometimes, it even felt like the road behind me had been swallowed up and taken over by corn fields. At this point, I was thinking things really couldn't get much worse unless my truck exploded. And as soon as I left the detour, things got worse.
Ask yourself this. What is worse than having to go through a detour with your gas tank close to empty and no gas stations around? The answer, the detour you finally found your way out of ends right in front of a rail road track with the gates down, lights flashing and a moving train. A very, very slow moving train. How slow was it? I'm fairly certain I could have finished reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace by the time it passed.
Once I cleared the rail road tracks, it was right back to the road construction. Although, apart from the occasional drunk driver flashing his brights at me for doing the speed limit, there were no more major icks. I had left my house in Madison, Wisconsin at about 12:30 am, and arrived at my destination in Illinois at a little past 4:00 am.
The moment I pulled into my mom's driveway, I took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. Because the only thought that was going through my head was, I get to do this all again on Monday. Woohoo.
