Coming to you live from Madison, Wisconsin, with leg one of our journey over. I'm sitting poolside while Daughter Three enjoys a quick swim after a long, hot afternoon on the road. Air temp when we left home was 97 degrees....saw 98 for quite a while on the car thermometer. With the dew point the heat index was roughly 243 degrees. Once we got rolling and gave the air conditioner a chance to do its thing the ride was mostly pleasant.
So, Wisconsin. If you love rolling hills and big woods (which I do) this is the state to drive through. For the western two hours anyway. It's comforting for me to see so much unspoiled wilderness - aside from the traffic screaming through the middle of it - when so much of our world seems dominated by the humans' existence. I should have let Daughter One drive for a while so I could just sight-see, but I probably wouldn't have been able to tear my eyes away from the road while in the passenger seat. Actually, I should have let all three of them take a turn driving so they'd have seen a little more of the scenery. Between their screens and their books I'm not sure they saw much of the country we drove through. I finally started giving a signal - barking like a dog...not sure why - when there was something extra special to look at. Otherwise, heads down, eyes missing everything.
So we talked about that. So much of life goes by unnoticed when heads are down, looking at the ground or more often anymore, screens. My faithful readers will recall my own personal struggles with "head-down-itus" while hunting...but I'm working on that. When I'm driving I have the opposite problem - head-on-a-swivel-trying-to-look-at-everything-itus. Tomorrow I'll be more assertive about my travelin' companions doing the same. It would be a shame for them to travel through three states for the first time and have no recollections of where they'd been.
Thankfully the first long drive of this trip ended with no problems along the way.....well, no big problems. Phone map lady sent us flitting about the countryside northwest of Madison, telling us she was saving 15 minutes by doing so. It probably would have been a lovely detour but for the fact the sun had already sank beneath the horizon. However, as we drove through.....well, wherever the heck we were.....the girls (who could no longer see their books) were delighted by the fireflies dancing alongside us in the ditches and fields. And wouldn't you know? About the same time we started noticing the little flashers the song "Fireflies" cut loose on the CD that had been popped in a half-hour earlier. This twist of timing also gave us the opportunity to discuss the difference between irony and coincidence, since the song playing while the bugs flashed was not ironic, contrary to my daughters' narrative of the moment.
Eventually, after about 17 backroads, we rolled into Madison, easily found our hotel....and were told their system booked us a room that wasn't available. So they sent us next door to a nicer hotel, wiped away the charge, and told us to come back for breakfast in the morning. Not irony, not coincidence....probably karma. Pretty sure I did something decent this week to deserve a break.
Part one of this adventure is now history. Time for bed and a decent night's sleep so we can complete the drive tomorrow. Ugh, tomorrow - Chicago. My heart trembles in fear at the thought of it.
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