Shuttle back from hotel to airport
New hire car and head on out.
By now the weather is very heavy rain and quite gusty winds.
We take turns of about 2 hours each to avoid too much fatigue.
Even big semi trucks are drifting in and out of lanes with the wind and everyone still seems hell bent on travelling at 130kph. We have to keep up to avoid getting run over and it is not pleasant charging into a lane alongside a heavy truck which seems to be spraying more water than Niagara as there is no idea what’s out front. Hopefully there are no stalled cars out there ahead of us.
It's halloween on the 31st and there are millions of pumpkins displayed in everyone's front yard in all sorts of ghoulish displays but there are stil an awful lot left in the fields as well.
Eventually around Toledo the weather starts to clear a bit and the driving becomes a little more comfortable as we can now see where we are going.
The sunset is quite pretty with all the cloud around but because we are now on the tollways we can’t stop to take photos as every time you get on or off you have to pay another toll and the tollways also have far fewer entries and exits.
Eventually however we stop for dinner and then begin the last 100km into Chicago.
The next hour is not the most pleasant in recent memory, I think my blood pressure must be off the charts as I can hear it ringing in my ears. It is now fully dark and we are into the Expressway and Skyway systems. These are elevated freeways which wind their way across the city wherever they can find space to put them. At one point we climb a ramp which must be 20 stories high to go over a bridge; I don’t know what we are going over as I am too scared to look down. It seems to be rush hour at 8 o’clock at night and everyone is going 130kph and I am just getting in everyone’s way.
We don’t have accommodation booked but we have been staying in hotels near the airports which makes picking up and dropping off hire cars a little more convenient, so the plan for tonight is to drive to the airport where we can get internet access and then search for hotel online and make a booking. This plan unfortunately doesn’t work out all that well in Chicago ... the airport is on the far side of the city so we have to cross it on a jungle of freeways that would put Los Angeles to shame and when get there, there is nowhere to stop so we end up just driving straight through and being spat out onto more freeways.
Eventually we find an off ramp to a mere 4 lane highway which seems like a back road after the last two hours and then to a MacDonalds for their free wifi so we can get on the net. We can see 6 hotels from here so we start with them; Mark is of the opinion that we just take the first place we can get as it is now 11 o’clock at night and it doesn’t matter what it costs as anything is better than going back out into the traffic.
Of course they are all full. Another half hour of phone calls and it appears we may be sleeping in the car until eventually I manage to find a room at the old faithful “La Quinta”, an economical but generally very good chain we have used before. Even more miraculous we don’t have to go back out onto the freeways as the GPS shows us a route on ordinary streets.
I think we are both quite shell shocked and it takes half an hour or so to settle down unwind a little.
At this time we are not all that impressed with Chicago but we are not going to have much time to change that opinion tomorrow because our changed timetable requires we are at the Amtrak station by midday to make our connection and we have to go back to the airport first to drop off the car.
This prospect is not a guarantee of a good nights sleep.
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