September 6th, 2004 - 10:14 pm
» 13 Aug 2004
I made it out to Carrie’s very early. I think we actually got on the road around 8:30, though I can’t now recall. I meant to snap a shot of us crossing into Wisconsin, but I didn’t have the camera out in time. Incidentally, we also tried to take a picture of one of the six bajillion ‘CHEESE’ signs in WI, but to no avail. We always didn’t see them soon enough and were moving too quickly. There are billions of them, though, giant standard-billboard-sized advertisements, some of them fancy (‘Cheese & Wine!’) and some of them simple. Ah, Wisconsin.
The weather was perfect, which was fortunate since we discovered that the air conditioning she’d just had fixed in her car wasn’t working. But — and I felt this even then, not just looking back — I think it only made the experience better. There was something freeing about the wind whipping in through the open windows, about breathing all that fresh summer air.
In Wisconsin we stopped at Exit 116 (off 35E). We’d stopped there a year and a half ago too, on the way down to St. Louis for Katie and John’s wedding. Carrie knew it from when she was little, and they had signs up advertising a new cow-themed McDonald’s Coming Soon! off of Exit 116.
And, indeed, a year and a half ago the McDonald’s was charmingly cow-y, with tiny black and white tiles making cow-print on the floor, and cow-print painted on the walls, and all sorts of other cow-y things that I can’t now recall. But now, sadly, the tiny tiles are all that remains. Now it’s some weird jazz thing, and there’s a terrifying statue of a moon-headed man playing a fake piano against one wall.
Though prettier than Iowa, Wisconsin managed to offer up some things on the same level of deeply-disturbing.
Illinois was less disturbing, though it had something worse: tolls.
And, in the end, it was just as silly.
Because we got such an early start we made it to Schaumburg at about three, much earlier than the ‘late supperish’ we’d told Katie. So we stopped at Barnes & Noble, browsed for a while, and had some iced chai and dessert. We turned up at her place around 4:30, and were joined shortly by Steph, and then John returning from work. Merriment ensued.