East

I'm in Eau Claire, WI, tonight, and I feel great.

I spent all (OK - most) of yesterday evening thinking, worrying and consulting maps.  I charted all the possible westward routes; each one turned south, and eventually east, at a different place.  They were all possible, but none made me feel that I had found what I was looking for.

Then this morning, I woke up (in Bismarck, ND) and lay in bed and thought some more.  I thought in the shower.  I was thinking at breakfast, and - it was just as I had taken up a forkful of scrambled eggs - I had a new thought:  "So what if I just turned around now and went home?"

Immediately I felt better.  

So I did. I finished my eggs, got in the car (under a setting almost-full moon) and did not hesitate to turn east onto I-94.  Soon the sun showed up, a blood-red egg yolk on the misty horizon, and rose slowly, slowly becoming the sun.  Seventy-five miles per hour all the way to Fargo.  For the first time this trip, I was in the "driving across America" groove.  I remained in that groove right to the end,* here in Eau Claire, 518 miles later.  It felt like the shortest trip so far.  (OK, it was the shortest trip so far, but it felt really short.)

North Dakota still looked like Kansas and Nebraska on the way back.  I returned to the Hudson's Bay Watershed, and left it again.  At Fargo I turned 45 degrees south and went on a slant across Minnesota.  The first twenty or thirty miles were corn fields as far as you could see, but it got hillier and agriculture seemed to disappear after that.  I know that the Mississippi River goes through Minneapolis but I did not see it, or a sign indicating it, even though I was looking carefully - or as carefully as I could considering I was driving through construction.

Tonight I'm just inside Wisconsin, in another town with a French name (which, by the way, means "clear waters").  Best plan for tomorrow involves continuing to diagonal down through Wisconsin and into Illinois, and then turn due south in Rockford, meeting I-80 in a jumbled collection of cities that includes Peru, Il, more of which later.  Then east on 80.  This is the only route that does not require me to drive through the center of Chicago, which would be a good thing.

So - I'm going to enjoy driving home - a sort of new experience.  I also may take an alternative route home from Ohio, by staying on I-80 through Pennsylvania, and maybe visit my alma mater.

 * - I didn't like Minneapolis much, but Minneapolis is a really big city and the road was under construction the whole way.