Around the Lakes

 Eau Claire, WI to Toledo, OH - 560 miles, 11 hours.

Never got to Peru.  I decided there was room for an adventure, so I took I-90 right down into Chicago and out, saving 53 miles and almost an hour.  Maybe.    

I-90 rolls down the Wisconsin diagonal in all its 8-lane glory for at least 60 miles, straight as an arrow, pointed right at the heart of Chicago.  For about the last ten miles of that, I could see downtown, where the skyscrapers are.  The sun was behind them, and it was a little hazy (wildfires?) so the buildings were a horror-movie silhouette, the sharp, angular, broken, long row of fangs of some unimaginable beast rising up out of Lake Michigan.  Really, it was quite a sight.  The highway brushed up against them on the west side, turning in to run through (or mostly below) them at their extreme southwest.  Traffic.  Maybe twenty minutes of very slow going, stop-and-go, and then suddenly - it was really quite a stark transition - we were spewed out onto a clear road in the sunshine and were fleeing at 70 miles an hour.  A quick look back in the mirror - and Chicago, now in the sun, looked like a PR photo.

So maybe I saved some time, but maybe I spent that time in the traffic jam.  Anyway, I know I spent a very long time in very slow traffic for miles because of construction in Indiana.  Maybe thirty minutes to go a few miles - and both directions were affected.  Then that's done - and another one appears five miles on  And another one.  Huge road construction projects which have to be taking months and months - and all traffic, on the major east-west highway in the region, adds maybe an hour to their trip.  And if that's not enough, the rest stops in Indiana are a gas station and an actual 7-11, and they still have toll booths.  Sheesh.

A large majority of the vehicles on the road with me today were trucks or commercial vehicles of some kind, and there were a lot of them.

Drove through Hammond, Indiana and Gary, Indiana, where the huge black behemoths that were US Steel plants in better days are still rotting and blighting the view of Lake Michigan.  Story my family knows by heart:  During the ur-trip across the country - my first - when I was 11, my mother took one look at Gary, Indiana from the car window and said, "If I'd ever seen this, we would never have named you Gary."

Tomorrow, I think I'm heading for Lewisburg, PA, for a stroll around the campus of Bucknell University, to see if I recognize anything.  Then home.

I'll tell the Peru story because it's a monumental travel story, but some other time.  I have a Zoom meeting:  Otsego County Democratic Committee By-Laws Committee.  Stimulating stuff.