(32) Drive to Galesburg, Illinois

Saturday, January 17^th: I walked outside this morning to put my bags in the van and immediately I felt something wrong. I was only wearing a hoodie and a long sleeve shirt and I wasn’t freezing! The temperature must have risen into the single digits because it felt almost like a summer breeze outside. There was a hockey team staying at the hotel we were in so when I went to have breakfast the entire lobby was filled with small kids, large bags and really talkative parents. Today was my first day riding in the Red van as opposed to driving the truck. We started our drive out from St. Cloud and the roads weren’t too bad. Kevin was driving and I was navigating for him. For the whole time, Kevin was teaching me all about his music choices from Beyonce to Michael Jackson to Diana Ross to really random stuff like Aerosmith. It was quite shocking because I assumed that we’d be listening mostly to classical music and operas, but it was a lot of fun regardless. Lindsay took over driving, with Dave as her navigator, and the road conditions slowly deteriorated. We passed into Iowa and were seeing huge wind gusts that were blowing snow all over the road. After she drove, Caroline took over, with Jeffery navigating, and the road conditions got even worse. We saw a number of cars and trucks that had slid off the road days before and hadn’t been pulled out yet. As we kept driving, we starting hitting traffic jams from cars that had just that afternoon or evening slid off the road. There were still police on the scene and even a tow truck or two. Through the rest of the drive we saw about two dozen of these types of car accidents and 3-4 similar truck accidents. It was fairly nerve racking but we all kept our cool and continued to drive on. Around 5:30pm we stopped again and I took over driving. I was making good time as we had about 140 miles to go. It looked like we’d get in around 8:00pm. We made it through the rest of Iowa and into Illinois. Right after crossing the border, we came upon the I-74 interchange that we would take to Galesburg. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention and went the wrong direction on I-74, taking us a good 20 miles or more out of our way. We were about 3 miles down the road when a suggestion was made to turn around in one of the emergency turn arounds. I though about it for a bit and then saw one coming. There were no other cars to be seen, so I decided to go for it! With no problem, we turned around and were headed in the correct direction and made it to the hotel, after driving 499 miles(6587 total miles), by 8:15pm. Boy was it a long day to say the least. Everyone else was already at the hotel and had gone to get food, so a few of us went over to the local grocery store for dinner. We watched a couple more episodes of “Lost” and then some of us played a couple of hours of poker. This time I did much better and had a lot of good hands. I ended up winning the night with $9. Rudy came in second with $7, Dave with $5, Carolyn with $4 and Eric lost everthing. It was 2:00am and I wasn’t tired, but everyone else was so we called it a night.

Sunday, January 18^th: DAY OFF! This was our first official day off in 12 days. I had a relaxing morning watching the morning news shows and having breakfast. I then went down to the hot tub and sat there for a bit. Caroline and I went into “downtown” to get some coffee from a local coffee shop. I slept the afternoon away while pretending to watch the NFL playoffs. Around 4:30pm, a group of us went down to Crappy’s Bar and Restaurant, to meet up with the die-hard football fans, for dinner and some football. The food was ok and it was nice to be out for a bit. When we left the bar it was snowing outside and was very pretty! After everyone was back from the bar, we watch another couple of episodes of “Lost” to top off the evening.