9/5 -- Finish the Drive to Chicago

Today was another long drive day -- all the way across the southern edge of Minnesota and the southwest corner of Wisconsin. South Dakota had started greening up as we neared Sioux Falls, and that greening continued in Minnesota, and the eastern side started getting hilly. Then we crossed the Mississippi River.

Barge on the Mississippi River

It was funny to me how much this felt like coming home. When I moved to California in 1997, I was kind of put off by all the brown hills and then came to love them as I saw them become green and then transition to golden. But rolling hills and trees and deep greens everywhere is more thoroughly home to me. When it was time for lunch, Jim was sick of our cheese and crackers and we spied a sign for Culver's -- this is not only a hamburger joint, it also has frozen custard. This is a typical Wisconsin treat - a kind of softserve ice cream that is much richer and creamier and has more substance than normal softserve -- it's kind of the Ben and Jerry's or Haagen Dazs of softserve. So of course we had to have one at lunch. YUMMM.

As we approached Illinois, we realized we would have to pay tolls and knew that the exit to Kristen's home was not manned, so we started trying to figure out how much we needed in coins to get off the highway legally. It turns out that not only is that exit not manned, there is no way to pay cash -- you have to have an I-pass (the Illinois fastrak) or within 7 days, go to the toll authority website and pay the toll in arrears -- AND it costs more than twice as much for cash.

We contacted Kristen to see if there was a way to register our car's license and pay with credit, but apparently not, so we had the clever idea of programming our car GPS to avoid toll roads. The end result was that the last 30-40 miles of driving was along the backroads of north central Illinois, winding our way through the corn and soybean fields to Huntley. We had said at the outset that we wanted to get off the Interstates as much as possible, and this worked out well -- we saved $9 in tolls plus the need to stop at 5 toll collection sites and work out how to pay the last one AND we got to see countryside and a couple cute little towns -- and it only took 9 minutes longer than the original toll route. A win-win all the way.

We even managed to time the drive so we got there by 4:30 PM AND missed the torrential downpour they had about an hour earlier. We got setttled in, went out for a lovely dinner in Algonquin, came back and collapsed.