[Christina] Day 11: Chicago or Bust!

This was easily the most boring and least geological day of driving as we drove from Minnesota to Chicago.

In brief:  We left Minnesota and drove south into Iowa just so say that we'd been to Iowa.  Iowa was a jerk.  It briefly routed us onto a gravel road just as we were trying to re-enter Minnesota.  That was a little bit of an adventure! [Elizabeth sidebar: Iowa was my last of the lower 48 to visit, and drat it, I wanted to try... a brief jaunt through Iowa doesn't *really* count as having been to the state, but I figured since we were within a 15 minute drive, it would be worth it just for grins. Of course, once you've driven on a dirt road in a state, I think you've actually officially been there.]

On the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, we stopped along the side of the road to see the Mississippi River.  It was large and pretty.

In Wisconsin, there was a sign for glacial drumlins at the rest stop, but other than that it, was a geology dead zone.

What this day lacked in geology, though, it made up in traffic.  We got stuck in horrible construction traffic in Milwaukee.  That ate an hour or so.  We escaped the Milwaukee traffic only to get caught in Chicago rush hour traffic, which is everything you'd expect it to be. [Elizabeth sidebar: yup, that was an adventure - an ordinarily <1 hour drive was ~3 hours. But we made it, darn it!]


But, at the end of the day, we were having a lovely evening with Elizabeth's awesome friends, which made all the boredom and all the traffic totally worth it. [Elizabeth sidebar: thanks to S and R for letting us crash. I hadn't seen them in many years, and it was lovely to catch up. One of the best (and worst) parts of being an academic is that my friends are scattered all over the country. It means I rarely get to see many of them, so this was a particularly special treat.]