Cleveland to Chicago

We’ve gotta be honest, McAllistour followers…the rides from Cleveland to Chicago and Chicago to Des Moines were not our finest hours. We got a later start leaving Cleveland than we had planned and the ride to Chicago took much longer than we anticipated, mainly because of ridiculous traffic heading into Chicago. Tim had wanted to stop at the law firm’s Chicago office to say hi to colleagues he mainly only speaks to on the phone. The office closes at 5:00 and we got to the outskirts of Chicago around 3:00, presumably plenty of time for a run into the city. We were completely stuck in traffic for the next almost 2 hours. Tim got off the highway and took a side street into town, but once we got closer in to the city, it was standstill traffic. Not good. We were hungry and needed to find a restroom. We finally got to the Aon Building at 4:50 but when Tim called the library staff, most of them were not around and the ones who were there were dealing with a Friday afternoon rush job. Tim thought he remembered from his time in Chicago years ago that there were restrooms in the Aon building. Remarkably we found a parking spot on the street and headed into the building. The low point came when Lisa said “if there are no bathrooms on this floor I’m going to stab you.”

Thankfully, Tim is stab-free, as he came through and found the bathrooms. The ride out of Chicago was as bad as the ride in but we finally arrived at the home of Tim’s friend Matt, a former co-worker at K & E. Matt lives in a great house in Skokie, Illinois and he was the prince of hospitality while we were visiting. Thanks Matt! We had a delicious dinner at an Indian/Nepalese restaurant in Evanston and called it a night.