Our Fantastic Voyage

I thought I would elaborate a little more on that car trip.

We took forever getting out of Chicago, just moving slow and packing slow and having to make multiple trips from the south side to the north side through the heart of downtown and the associated traffic. All in all it was a lot of exhausting BS that left us done at 8:30pm with 600 miles to drive to get home. Kinda blues-brothers esque I guess.

Anyway, we were both really exhausted by 10pm anyway, so we stopped and bought a random assortment of junk food and soda to fuel the trip. And when I say random, I mean it, we each bought a grab bag that was kept secret from the other, and then distributed said mystery items to the other upon request. It was interesting and kept us awake.

We drove in shifts of two hours, just trucking down the highway in the darkness at 80mph or more, with only semi trailers keeping us company. It was pretty surreal, with some scary moments when corners came out of nowhere in the dark. At one point I turned off the headlights, and out in rural kentucky with no other cars on the road, everything went utterly black. I turned them back on pretty quickly.

The hardest shift for me was the first, and it was a minute-by-minute fight to stay awake and alert. After that, I got about an hour and a half of fitful sleep while alex drove (he said I snored really loud), and then every other shift was pretty fun. Especially as the sky lightened or we could see light pollution around major cities over the horizon. The end of the trip was positively beautiful, with a misty morning in the Tennessee river valley, on a road that weaves next to and across the river and surrounding mountains.

At the end of it, I crashed into bed and slept until about 3 the next afternoon. Alex got up at 9 to work a half-shift lifeguarding and then go kayaking. Crazy brother I have.

Random thought of the moment: my mother is the kind of person who buys limited-edition cereals. I'm the kind of person who opens the box and eats them.

That says something about us, but I don't know what exactly.