Posting from the road! The car! Headed to Michigan to visit Chris’s folks for the holidays. This will be brief and filled with blurry photos. I do it for you, Holidailies.
We take the Skyway, which we get to from a ramp that swoops up absurdly high from Stony Island Avenue; driving up it makes us feel like we’re launching into the air like in a cartoon. A few minutes later we reach the bridge, and after that, the steel plants and Gary. It’s the loneliest landscape ever and it’s always either overcast or impossibly bright bleached-out sunlit (it was this morning). You always feel like you’re the only ones on earth on that part of the trip, just you in your car hurtling through.
We made it through the snow corridor (southwest Michigan) without snow, which is swell from a weather standpoint, but I miss the way it makes the trip a little more epic.
We’ve passed three billboards for Bronner’s so far. Also, Larry The Cable Guy is appearing at the Firekeepers Casino, and his face appears on a giant LED display the size of a trailer and I bet it looks terrifying at night.
On tiny road trips like this it feels like anything goes. We only have to follow the directives of the Garmin Lady Voice, and even then we tend to leave her huffily RECALCULATING a lot as we stop to get gas and jerky and Taco Bell (we will not speak of Taco Bell). Even when it’s not Christmas it feels strange and time-suspended, and now, with carols playing at the gas stations, it’s even more so.
I leave you with this amazingly emphatic sign. I don’t quite understand it, but hey, it has spirit. Not Christmas spirit, but Almost Holiday Transitional Time spirit. God bless us everyone, and here’s some cheap cookies.
All road trips put me into that suspended place where anything might be possible around the next bend and you never know what that roadside store will be peddling. You captured it beautifully.
We have Garmin set for the British male voice. He is especially huffy about recalculating. For the record, his name is Soren Lorenson.
Ha! Ours is named Garmina Burana.
I’m waving from the east side of the state! Merry Christmas! For the record when we bought our TomTom, I set it up with a male voice (I call him Julio) because my husband was always saying, “Yes, dear” to the old one. I was getting jealous.
Apparently when the skyway first opened, my great grandfather would take people up on it (he lived and worked in Jeffrey Manor) for fun.
Honestly it still is tons of fun to me though I don’t joyride it like my ancestor.