Day 10 - Chicago to Minneapolis

The morning after my last Chicago post, I woke up early to go to Rachel's Hogwash show. Her improv troupe, Hogwash, does improv for kids. Pretty simple concept, plus the kids also get to dress the actors and decorate the stage. Right before the show started, I met up with my companions for the next legs of the trip:

STEVE, who a lot of you likely remember. We briefly dated in 2004 when he worked for Fair Vote in DC. We've stayed friends, and he was the guy who lived in our guesthouse around the New Year. If you're an Olympian, he was the redheaded white guy who came in and talked about working on political campaigns.

PETE, Steve's best friend since high school. Pete and Steve have been roommates off and on (they were when I met Steve in DC), and both visited me in New Orleans this winter. Pete is also a teacher, although he teaches middle school math. And in Ware, Massachusetts. Pete was originally going on a parallel solo road trip on his motorcucle, but his bike broke down outside of St. Louis, so he hopped in the car with Steve and...

TROUBLE, whose name is really Rachel, but that's confusing. Trouble is a substitute teacher at Pete's middle school. She heard about the trip through Pete, and asked Steve if she could tag along. Steve's a hippy, so he said yes, and voila! I have company with estrogen. Yay!

Rachel's show was HILARIOUS - "I wanted to catch a bus to the library, but everyone was so busy on the Internet, I didn't have anyone to drive" - and afterward, we went to hop in Steve's car to head back to Rachel's. But the car got towed. Damn you, Wrigleyville! So we walked several thousand miles (more like two and a half, but I was wearing Crocs) to go bail out the kidnapped car and get lunch. We had lunch at this vaguely Turkish place with pretty decent thin crust pizza (of course I'd get thin crust pizza in deep dish Chicago). We made a not-so-quick stop at Whole Foods so Trouble could buy something called compucha, packed up my stuff into the car (way less room now that there were two unplanned people in the car).

After leaving Chicago, we drove through Wisconsin to Minneapolis, where my mom's family is from, and stayed overnight with my cousin, Katie. We went out to a bar I believe was called Williams, and I got my ass handed to me in pool. We went back to her apartment, crashed out, and showered and were on the road by noon. Although we did have to make a brief detour for my cell phone, which I left at Katie's.

We got lost on the way out of the city, since major sections of I-35W are shut down. Remember when the bridge collapsed last summer in Minnesota? That was 35W. We finally navigated out, to meet up with Trouble at her friend's house in fairly rural Minnesota.