WFRV

We're up and out of the RV park by 8:30am. We've learned to take navy
showers fast and pack our lunches the night before, because making a lunch
while lurching about the kitchen is not easy. We're off to Mokena, IL,
about a 6-hour drive. I listen to a podcast of Michael Pollan talking about
his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and he talks about how most of the
American diet is corn. Corn is in drinks, baked goods, processed foods, and
even in burgers because that's what the cows eat. He says a McDonald's
hamburger is 56% corn. The entire time I'm listening to this, about 45
minutes, I'm driving 65 miles an hour and passing field after field of corn.

Finally we near Chicago, the Traffic City. You think Boston is
bad? Everywhere we go, no matter what time of day, Chicago has traffic, and
most of it seems to be due to poor planning. The fact that huge trucks
barrel through the city night and day doesn't help. We hit a half-hour
traffic jam because our four-lane highway has to go through only two toll
booths. Two! By the time we get to the RV park we're tired, although it's
only 3pm. Our neighbor is cleaning a black electric guitar; we pray he isn't
going to play it at night. We're about twenty-five yards from an interstate
highway; there are trees scattered about and a lot of tents across the way;
directly in front of us are three porta-potties and a Lollapalooza Buffett
(sic) sign. Mike and Sam go for a dip in the uninspiring campground lake;
they're back in forty minutes. We have tacos for dinner, watch Eight Below,
and get to bed early. There's a tremendous storm that night with so much
lightning that at one point we think there's a police car in the RV park.
Later we read in the local paper that a woman in a house two blocks from the
RV park was struck by lightning and her home caught on fire that night.

The next morning we have our rental car by 8am, and lucky for us, the agent
is chatty; he tells us that Wednesday's Cubs game was called due to rain and
that it's being played Thursday as a double-header. That means the game we're
supposed to attend today is now a double-header, and it starts at noon, not
at 1:20pm. We drive thirty-seven highway miles to Wrigley Field; it takes
us an hour and forty-five minutes. Guess why. The Cubs lose to the
Diamondbacks 9-2; we leave after the seventh-inning stretch when the whole
park stands up to sing Take Me Out To The Ballgame loudly and off-key. (A
medical tip: when your pill bottle says "May cause drowsiness. Alcohol may
intensify this effect." don't have a beer at a ball game. You will fall
asleep in your seat.)

The Shedd Aquarium is our next stop, an attraction they obviously don't want
people to discover because there are no signs for it. There's a tremendous
line to get in that stretches outside, down the stairs, and onto the
sidewalk. A guard stands at the museum entrance, letting in a handful of
people every few minutes. Denise avoids this by using the Accessibility
Entrance and slipping into line when the guard's back is turned. Mike, Ben
and Sam have great fun calling her The Slimer but when she suggests they go
wait outside in the line for an hour they decline. The aquarium is
beautiful (a GEM according to our AAA travel guide) and we spend two hours
there.

Next we want to go to the Twin Anchors restaurant which had been recommended
to us for dinner; we head the two miles north to get there and what do we
hit? Traffic! Finally it occurs to us to call the restaurant and they tell
us they have a half-hour wait and do not take reservations. By now it's
6:30pm and we have a lot to do because we're leaving very early the next
day. We turn around and head south, back to Mokena. It takes us 15 minutes
to get back to where the aquarium is; we've spent 45 minutes driving 2 miles
north and 2 miles south. We finally get back to Mokena around 8pm; we grab
a quick bite at a Quiznos (overheard in line: "Everything here stinks; I'll
have gum for dinner") and get back to the RV to see that our guitar-toting
neighbor is having a party. It's a large group of young men standing around
drinking about five feet from the back of our RV. We've brought a
white-noise machine which drowns out the noise enough for the kids to sleep.
Unfortunately, Mike and Denise can hear everything; the country music, the
laughing, the man at midnight repeatedly screaming "Hang up the phone!", and
at 3am, women's voices in that apologetic goodbye tone ("Okay, well, we'll
call you") and the men still laughing and talking, oblivious to (or perhaps
desperately avoiding) the fact that the women want to go.

# posted by LDW @ 12:46 AM