Ready to crash

Today was awesome slash draining. My writing will be much more entertaining when I'm not exhausted, so for now, here's a quick timeline with a few photos.

Monday, 8:05 pm ET (Columbus) -- Blake arrives in Columbus, ready to hit the road. He goes fake worst when he sees how packed the car is already before we load in his woman-like 11 outfits for the trip. By the time everything is snug and settled, riding "bitch" in the backseat during this entire roadtrip has become a strong staple of WYR.

Monday, 8:38 pm ET (Columbus) -- We make our first innocent bystander of the roadtrip go full worst. We're trying to set the milage as we're leaving, but we forget that we're actually on a public road, with a crazy man flailing his arms and honking his horn behind us.

Monday, 11:03 pm CT (I-65, between Indianapolis and Chicago) -- We see 3.2 miles worth of cars going full worst in the southbound direction when they're trapped in a complete standstill. I will give anything not to be stuck in something like that during this trip.

Tuesday, July 3, 12:38 pm CT (Chicago) -- We arrive on the Dan Ryan Expressway with the city of Chicago brilliantly lit on our right, and ghetto-ass US Cellular Field on our left. The home of the White Sox and the Cubs have both been hit prior to this particular trip, as pointed out at http://tonycastricone.com/stadiums/

Minutes later, we're crashing at my friend Brian's place literally down the road from Wrigley Field.

Tuesday, 11:54 am CT (Wrigleyville) -- A great lunch at a small Irish pub called Cullen's. Authentic Irish accents out of the servers. Quality. Then we stopped by Wrigley for a quick photo op before taking the train to Lake Shore Drive. As usual, the L was full of interesting cats, some of them trying to sell us stuff. One guy wanted us to buy some sort of magazine off him for a dollar. When we declined, he went ultimate begger and yelled "C'mon guys!!! You can do this!!!"

Tuesday, times are getting hazy due to alcohol (96th floor of the John Hancock Building) -- The drinks were expensive, but for these kinda views, they could've doubled the price, and we still would've been all about it.

On one side of the building, a crystal clear view of the Sears Tower, Soldier Field, the United Center, the Navy Pier, and Chicago's most recognizable structures.

On the other side, a good look at the Magnificent Mile.

The rest of the photos are relatively self-explanatory... so here they are.

Then we hopped a cab back to Brian's pad. Our cabby went legit worst when we almost got run over by a bus. He was a man of coal black skin, Central American decent, and with a short fuse. He pulled next to the bus, rolled down his window and started yelling, "Fuck-a you!!! You son-of-a-beetch... cock-sucka!!" Full worst.

Blake proceeded to back the cabby in what turned into a 20-second back-and-forth argument, then cemented the cabby's friendship by telling a very crude yet very funny joke, that caused the driver to howl in hilarious ultimate-best form so hard, he almost had to stop driving.

Tomorrow, a somewhat early day. We're hoping the 4th of July holiday means a less-than-usual traffic flow on I-55 South heading toward St. Louis.

We'll probably hit the arch before we check out the Cardinals' game against I-can't-even-remember-who-the-hell-they-play-and-I-really-don't-care. So we've got roughly five hours of driving to STL, and then the loooooong all-night-and-all-day 21-hour trek to the Grand Canyon.

Say a prayer that we make it....

That's all for now, we'll write again when we encounter another computer... which might not be for three days.......

-TC