thursday 8.2.2007 (minneapolis to chicago)
Posted in baseball roadtrip on August 6th, 2007 by jenni | No Comments »
Tags: chicago, illinois, roadtrip
[To view the entire Flickr photoset from this trip, go here.]
Wendy, Willis, Matt and I piled in Matt’s car and rushed the hell out of town on Thursday after work. We didn’t get on the road til almost 7, but we had nothing to do but get to Chicago that night.
At one point, Matt had to decelerate from 72mph because he was so caffeinated he was seeing through time. We got to the hotel around 2am, and jumped into bed as quickly as we could.
horse tongue! 
We survived the bleak nothingness of southern Illinois and stopped quickly in Metropolis so Stephanie could see Superman. We arrived just in time for some kind of bizarre religious Superman festival; the main street was blocked off and there were vendors selling state-fair food and cheap designer knockoff schlock. A couple hundred old people were crammed in a tent listening to gospel music. It gave us the willies, so we got the hell out of there and crossed the border into Kentucky.
We drove over to see the Parthenon. Stephanie was unimpressed. As a sports fan, she was way more excited by the Coliseum (I even learned there’s a sports team there called the Titans, and apparently they play a game known locally as ‘football’), which was crawling with country music fans in town for the CMA festival. We drove around for a while trying to find a parking spot amongst the crowd of cowboy-hat-tube-top-wearing fans. The nice thing about Nashville is that all the funny touristy stuff is confined to a few blocks along Broadway, from Ryman Auditorium (the original Grand Ole Opry) to the… well, Hard Rock Cafe. Whatever.
Anyway, we wandered. I pointed out the Batman building. We went into the offensive souvenir shop where half the merchandise comes emblazoned with a confederate flag. We stopped into Hatch Show Print, because I’m obsessed (my 
They had a bunch of tents set up, selling state-fair food (again!), and crappy beer. There was a tent with Sharpie markers, one for eBay, and a cooking tent sponsored by Mrs. Dash. No, I’m not joking. There was even a karaoke stage, on which bemused fans in various degrees of patriotic decoration were belting their hearts out to today’s greatest country. It was… interesting. We went to the Charlie Daniels museum instead. And then, we were just in time for the opening of the world-famous Wildhorse Saloon. If you’re not me, you probably don’t recall that it’s the place I learned to line-dance.
I was feeling nostalgic, so I ordered fried pickles even though Stephanie wouldn’t touch them. I ate a few, then had a ‘cowboy’ caesar salad. As she pointed out, I was eating the same thing I eat at Luce: caesar salad and a diet Coke. I told her to shut up, since it was the only thing on the menu I could eat.
We got to Bonnaroo at 10:30, well before the shows started. We had no trouble getting into day parking, as all the campers had finally settled. I wish I could adequately represent what the camping looked like: huge open fields full of tents, as far as one could see. It was pretty awesome. And a complete mess. People were walking down the road to bathe in the dirty creek. The whole place already smelled like garbage. We, however, were clean.
The show was so great. I loved it. We were up close enough to see everything, and they rocked hard in that Tennessee way. They had crazy hillbilly hair and the tightest jeans ever seen on human beings. During the show, which was under a big tent, it started pouring outside, and everybody cheered and ran out into the rain.
We saw Del McCoury and My Morning Jacket, and spent some time laying in the sun listening to whatever band was nearby. I ate a hummus wrap and immediately felt sick because of the heat. It was better to not eat at all, and drink water whenever necessary, but not too much, as we had a very good reason: avoiding the port-a-potties again. Word was getting around about how bad they were already, and there was no way I’d go willingly. So we devised a carefully-executed technique we termed ‘controlled dehydration’: drink enough to stay conscious, but not enough to have to pee. And it worked!
We got coffee, then headed to Jack Daniels. I was hoping Goose would be there to give us a tour. He was working, but had just taken a group out and wouldn’t be back for a couple hours. We didn’t have the time to wait, so we checked out the visitor’s center, did some souvenir shopping in Lynchburg, and then headed back to Manchester.
We heard some of Burning Spear, Marc Ribot, Marc Broussard, Taj Mahal, and Cracker as we walked around. I got a falafel sammich and met some awesome people from Louisiana who talked about their camping nightmare, and how they were prepared to run as fast as possible after the last show that night. We weren’t even waiting around for that, we were leaving after Maroon 5. None of that 9 hour shit again, thank you.
A cute boy complimented my dirty kitty shoes and offered me his pipe; I declined. I hope Stephanie appreciates my restraint. Guster was OK live, but not great. The crowd was really fun, though. The second the show was over, I pushed my way near the front, as instructed by my sister, who was desperate to see Maroon 5 up close and personal. We congratulated ourselves on being maybe 20 feet from the stage before the rumors started circulating: they had cancelled. The singer had blown out his voice. I felt really bad for her.
It wasn’t actually that bad for me, because Stephanie took over driving and I zoned out. I putzed with the CDs, I cleaned the car, I didn’t sleep, but I pretended to in hopes I could even convince myself. On my shifts, I averaged between 80-85, and kept bumping up my time estimates; I had planned on getting home by midnight at the earliest. We managed to hardly stop at all, and were back in Minnesota by 9:30pm.
If you don’t mind, I’ve taken the liberty of redrawing the map in accordance with my theory. So, you’ll see that the large tangerine-colored state is the territory now known as Kentuckinois. The salmon-colored state near the top remains as a tiny remnant of the original Illinois, and contains mostly Rockford and various tollbooths along the interstate. The lime-colored state along Lake Michigan encompasses what is now officially named Chicagoland. All other midwestern states remain as is (for now). I think you will all agree that this is a great improvement on United States cartography.
I dumped the quarters from my wallet onto the table and headed to the jukebox. What I found there was almost too wonderful to relate, but I’ll try: the first twenty or so selections were all songs
On the way out of town, we stopped for coffee; all the Starbucks baristas were singing along with that Natalie Merchant song about getting older, and complaining about their pathetic barista lives. We took a detour to the town of Juliette, home of the Whistle Stop Cafe (of 
We had discovered it in the AAA guide the last time we were in Georgia, and Heather has had recurring fantasies involving their biscuits and sweet tea ever since. They’re only open for ‘luncheon’ during the week. The kitchen is in the middle of the little building, with a lunch counter facing it. There’s a hallway on either side, and then dining rooms that branch out from there. The rooms are small and connect together like a maze. One of them has a large table with eight seats around it; another has two huge old creaking booths and nothing else. The seating is á la VFW post, cheap veneer tables and vinyl chairs. The waitress brought us the bread, which is amazing: buttermilk biscuits and little corn bread sticks. I asked her where the restrooms were located, and she gestured off towards the distance somewhere, saying, “through that door, you take a right and a right and a left and a left.”
I love the south.
Leaving the restaurant, I again felt like crap, so Heather got to drive. I passed out for half an hour in the passenger seat, then felt like returning to the living. She informed me that I had missed the bamboo farm that I was intentionally looking out for, and then pointed out the hurricane evacuation crossovers that allow people to drive on both sides of the freeway while running for their lives. We figured those would probably be in use before long, since Hurricane Isabel was headed that way. At 2:50, I sighted my first seagull. We were getting near the ocean.
(Tybee island is on the Atlantic, 20 miles east of Savannah, across a series of bridges and causeways, and past miles of seagrass, turtle crossings, and palm trees.) The girl at the counter called me honey and sweetie and told me I was very striking. I swooned.
I called the parents to let them know we had arrived safely. They couldn’t believe how quickly we had gotten there, and I could hear my dad silently calculating driving times and speeds in his head, as usual. He highly disapproved of the fact that we had driven all night as well, of course. I told them about Atlanta and Macon and our early-morning visit to the Waffle House. Then my mom told me Johnny Cash had just died. That kind of dampened my enthusiasm for the beach.
We drove three blocks past our hotel and found the end of Highway 80, and a block and a half of little shops and restaurants. We went into a couple stores, which had everything on end-of-season clearance. Heather saw Ben & Jerry’s, so we stopped in, and discovered that their flavor of the month was sugar-free blueberry. Yay!