Getting There Is Half The Fun

Guess where I’ve been all weekend? Hint: It is known as “The Tall Corn State.” If you guess “Iowa," then you are correct! I spent the weekend visiting my friend, Sandy.

I left last Friday morning in the bitter cold. What was supposed to have been a four-hour drive to Iowa turned into a 5 1/2 hour drive because of Stupid HWY 20, which apparently has a Business HWY 20 that is different from Regular HWY 20. Which I found out the hard way. I was driving along, merrily singing Christmas carols with the radio, when HWY 20 W morphed into Business HWY 20 E supernaturally, without one stinkin’ sign and/or me realizing it until I came to a complete dead end. Looking for some direction, I stopped at a gas station, where a kind man informed me that I would need to back track for quite a distance to get back on HWY 20 W. So I did, and then soon began noticing sights I had passed an hour ago! Same church. Same road construction. Same dead end. It had happened again! Evil HWY 20 W had morphed into Business HWY 20 E and spun me in the complete opposite direction from where I needed to go. I was living in an episode of “The Twilight Zone!”

Near tears, I stopped at a church to see if a priest had time to perform a quick Highway Exorcism, but the church was closed. So I stopped next at a Quick Mart where an employee directed me out of my dead-end habit trail and onto the salvation that came in the form of I90. So the bad news was that I lost 1 1/2 hours. The good news was that I became very intimately acquainted with the city of Rockford.

I had no further incidents of getting lost, but one other adventure. I was driving in a rural area and felt “the call of nature,” so I stopped at the only place in sight; an antique shop attached to a restaurant. The restaurant was closed, so I went into the shop to use the bathroom. The snooty (and lying) owner told me she did not have a working bathroom in the store. “Yeah, right,” I thought about saying, “And what exactly do you use, one of the antique chamber pots??” She gleefully informed me there was a port-a-potty in the backyard that I was welcome to inhabit. I had no other choice, much as I hated to do it.

The port-a-potty sat on top of an ice-covered hill. I had to pull myself up by the branches of a convenient evergreen to get there, slipping and sliding all the way; risking my very life. It was entirely unpleasant; an adventure that I wish to completely put out of my mind forever, after I finish this post. I only tell you about this sordid part of my trip to warn you never to drink 20 oz. of coffee while driving to Iowa in the winter.

The rest of my drive was relaxing and uneventful. I passed some beautiful and charming small towns, some rolling hills, and lots of frozen corn fields, finally arriving at my friend’s house at 2:30p. And we had an amazing weekend together, which I will tell you about tomorrow.