Posts Tagged Illinois

Road Trip Day Three

So, this was the first REAL day of my road trip, the first two  were the weekend before and their goal was just to get me to Indianapolis where I would spend 3 days working, and then kick off the real road trip from almost halfway across the country for the stuff I actually care about seeing more than just “wasting” my time driving past stuff instead of experiencing it.

So, my day started off early, I got packed up and out on the road. Most of this day was also just busy travel, I headed out from Indy on the main highway to hit up Chicago to see Kelly for lunch. Traffic was pretty smooth for the most part right up until I got on Rt. 90 to go into Chicago to meet her at her work, such is life.

I went to college with Kelly and she is from MA originally but moved out to Chicago a few years ago, so I don’t see her as much as I used to, so I take the opportunity when it presents itself. I met her at work and we went for lunch at a burger place she recently found and it was pretty awesome. I had a bacon wrapped burger that was also  served with 4 strips of bacon on top of it with the lettuce, tomato and onion, ON A PRETZEL BUN. AWESOME. I do love me giant soft pretzels!

So I left her back to work and headed out on my way. I shouldn’t have set the GPS to avoid highways yet on my trip, because of that setting, it took me the worst possible way out of Chicago I think, anyway, it took me over 2 hours to go 19 miles before I was out of traffic. Thankfully my bike isn’t air cooled otherwise I probably would have over heated. I definitely saw some sketchy parts of Chicago on the way.

I then cruised through the Illinois countryside and into the Iowa countryside, crossed the Missisippi River and got to Cedar Rapids that night, where I stayed with a nice woman, her husband and their son via couchsurfing.com. I stayed on an air mattress in their computer room because they had another couchsurfer who was staying in their guest room. They were super nice and I was unfortunately super tired so I wasn’t super sociable with them as I normally would have been, but I spent some time in the morning talking and chatting about things prior to leaving. I really like the site, just wish most people were a little less flaky and it worked better for super short notice, but oh well.

This is about the route that I took to get from start to finish, just for personal privacy I didn’t put the exact addresses of where I stayed, but you can click on the picture to bring you to an interactive map at Google Maps.

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