I'll blog about the Chicago trip and my friend's wedding in more detail once I'm in San Diego and have time (and energy) to write tomorrow night. But just for now, and to have something on this page to link to from the main BC home page, here are some quick thoughts.
Toll roads suckWe have toll bridges in the Bay Area, but they're bridges; you expect to pay to cross major bodies of water. And they have actual living humans in them to take your toll; $2 or $3 on most of them now. The toll highways in the Chicago area are different; they're hard to tell from regular highways on the maps, they wind all through the major areas of the city and suburbs, and they have on ramps and off ramps and such just like normal highways that our taxes go to create. The difference is that all of the off ramps have toll booths on them to keep you from getting off for free, and every few miles the three or four lane highway expands to 15 or 20 lanes, each of which has a toll booth... an automated toll booth with a plastic basket to hurl your change into.
Don't have any coins? Well I guess you sit there until you die, cause they don't take cash money or credit cards, and you don't know that until you roll up to the first one with your California wallet and California cash in hand. Luckily for our weekend, Malaya had her shoulder bag with her and was able to dig out enough nickels and dimes to get us through the two eighty cent tolls, and then the third one, for a seemingly-pointless thirty cents, had a human in one of the booths, who gave me back seventy cents for my dollar.
Locals buy the fast pass, and they obviously know to stock up on coins, and if we'd been driving one of our own cars we'd have had plenty of quarters, but in our rental, with no tip off from the rental company or the maps or the road signs, (they said "toll road," but nothing about "coins only") we damn near starved to death out there.
No Cops RuleThis was somewhat ameloriated by the fact that there are no police anywhere in the Greater Chicago Area.
That's not actually true; we saw one or two downtown and we saw one with a victim pulled over early morning Monday on the way to the airport, but there were never any cops in any position to inconvenience us. We would have seen at least a dozen rolling through equivalently-busy downtown streets in SF or Oakland, and we saw one, as we were leaving the city on Sunday, and he was white, skinny, and driving along with one arm out the window while looking about as imposing as
Barney Fife.
I drove all the time, and on those toll roads with their 55MPH speed limits, we were very seldom under 85MPH there and 60 in the 35 zone done town, and I felt completely safe doing it since.... there are no cops anywhere in the Greater Chicago Area.
Unlimited desert at someone else's wedding = fat little piggiesThis one actually applies more to me than to anyone else there, since I made at least half a dozen runs down the desert table while most people were waddling around, groaning about how full they were. I had maybe half a dozen of the equisite white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies, but I mostly hit the fruit. There were strawberries (with warm chocolate fondue) and huge platters of bites of honey dew, cantaloupe, and pineapple. I must have had half a pineapple during the course of the evening, for I love them in inverse proportion to how often I eat them, an unfortunately mathematical function caused almost entirely by their disproportionately-high price in the local markets.
One of the coolest things at the wedding was the parting gifts table, which had big trick-or-treat'ers delight bowls of mixed shiny candies, scoops to ladel them up with, and cute little orange Chinese food take out boxes, personalized with the name of the wedding couple. People (us included) were filling those boxes with the Hershey's Kisses, miniature Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, peppermint patties, and hard candies, and chortling off into the night.
I doubt that anyone else took an extra box over to the fruit stretch and filled one with pineapple chunks and strawberries, though. They made a lovely accent to our conteniental breakfast the next morning.
I can not write a short post to save my life.But we knew that already...
