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.

Road Trip Map Day 3, 2015