Are there any songs about Minnesota?

This photo, I think, sums up Wisconsin pretty perfectly:

I don’t have much to say about Minnesota, for two main reasons:
a) Minneapolis is where I put my camera through a warm wash and cold rinse, and
b) Minneapolis is also where a particular friend of mine now lives, to whom the term “college drinking buddy” would not be unapplicable.
Therefore, I neither saw much of the city nor would have had the chance to document it photographically had I seen it. The bit that I did see looked very nice; it was quite a clean city, and I was amused by the series of skywalks that stretched from building to building across the streets downtown, although I was also glad that I was leaving without experiencing the winter cold that necessitated an enclosed network for pedestrian traffic.

This was just a strange thing to drive past, on my way out of Minnesota. Nothing like your (relatively unusual) name plastered across a billboard exhorting you to “THINK.”

Bonus material! Springfield, IL

One of the perks that I anticipated with taking a solo drive cross-country is the ability to pull off my route at a moment's notice in order to visit, say, the World's Biggest Ball of Twine, without having to check with any fellow travellers. However, what I didn't consider was the fact that since I had scheduled myself trips of at least eight hours on almost every leg of the journey, I ended up rather disinclined to make detours that would add to an already lengthy day's travel (to say nothing of the fact that out west, their idea of a "nearby" attraction is frequently upwards of 30 miles off the highway).

This is one of the stops that I did make, and - due respect to Lincoln - it was mainly because my route took me basically straight through Springfield anyway. It's a cute little city, but not one that I would have considered going far out of my way to visit. I'm glad I did stop there, though, because it turned out to be more rewarding than I expected.

The Lincoln Home National Historic Site (as they call it) is the only national park in Illinois, and it's something of a misnomer, since it would lead you to believe that it consists of the Lincoln house and nothing else. What the National Park Service has actually done is to purchase and preserve the few square blocks around the house as well, restoring it as accurately as they can to the neighborhood that Lincoln would have been familiar with.

The Lincoln house - the only one he ever owned, where he expected to return after leaving the White House - holds pride of place at the crossroads of the site.

Admission is free, thanks to Robert Lincoln, Abe's oldest son and the only one to survive to adulthood. Apparently, during their stay at the White House, the Lincolns rented out this house in Illinois, and after the assassination, those renters started making money off of visitors to the house. Robert subsequently sold the house to the federal government for a dollar, with the stipulation that it remain free and open to the public.

As you might expect from the NPS, the interior of the house has been painstakingly restored and preserved as it would have appeared when the Lincolns were in residence. Highlights include:

the desk in the parlor where Lincoln accepted the nomination to the presidency,


the original banister of the staircase (and yes, touching it is oddly like reaching straight back into the past),


and the real Lincoln bedroom.

I'd expected the town in general, and the tour in particular, to be a rather solemn experience, all things considered, but it wasn't, surprisingly. Despite the tragic circumstances of Lincoln's death, the site was unquestionably focused on his life; as this place was where he came into his own both professionally and personally, the focus was only fitting. About his adopted hometown, Lincoln himself asserted, "To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything."

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And now, for something completely different: I got the magic phone call yesterday, and I'll be starting work as a UCLA NICU RN (and other acronyms as well) come February! Yay employment! :-D

And, if you're interested, I enjoyed this little time-lapse video of the construction of the new building that UCLA just moved into. Appropriately enough for a hospital in Los Angeles, it plays a little like what you'd get if you paid Disney to animate the construction of a hospital - and then gave the animators crack.

Bet your bottom dollar you lose the blues in Chicago

Back to the Windy City.

My ulterior motive for visiting this place was a pilgrimage of sorts. After all, it was practically a character itself in The Blues Brothers. Unfortunately, since it was released in 1980, not many of the sites in the movie are still what they were back then, although I did get to see "the honorable Richard J. Daley plaza" - "where they got that Picasso." (Thanks, Elwood and Jake.)

However, there was another film made more recently and shot on location in Chicago, and if you know me, it shouldn't be too hard to guess which film I'm talking about (hint: Chicago played Gotham City). Thanks to IMDb, I was able to track down:

the Old Post Office, which was the setting for the bank heist in the first scene,


the Twin Anchors, a.k.a. the bar where Two-Face makes his first public appearance,


and the Atwood Café (I'm not really sure where this appeared in the movie, but IMDb assures me it did).

For the record - I am a giant, giant dork.


In case you hadn't heard, Chicago has, you know, pretty decent food. I set my sights on consuming a Chicago-style hot dog and a real deep dish pizza (in one day, without needing to have my stomach pumped). And I succeeded, and they were both fantastic, despite the fact that I managed to acquire them from an Oak Brook-based chain restaurant and a British pub, respectively.

Portillo's. That is a hot dog, hiding under mustard, relish, onions, tomatoes, sport peppers, and a pickle. I'm all about my ketchup (I am a descendant of the Ketchup Kid, after all), but this made me an immediate convert to the Chicago way of culinary thinking (although I will admit that I cheated - that's a Sam Adams Octoberfest that I had with it).

A real Chicago deep-dish pizza. I only managed two slices of it (and it was a small, personal-pan size, too), traded another to one of my fellow barflies for a sample of his ribs, and ended up - criminally - having to throw away the rest, as I had no way to keep it cold or heat it up at my hotel.


For as fun and welcoming as Chicago looks during the day, I think I like it even better at night. With the river and the terrific skyline, I can't remember ever seeing a more beautiful urban evening. I walked down to Navy Pier as the sun was setting, which is similar to Santa Monica Pier, yet felt somehow even more commercialized:

Then, after the aforementioned pizza (the fact that I only had two slices was the only reason I was still able to move), I took in the sights of downtown after dark.

My last stop of the night was the Hancock Center, and although it's only the third tallest building in the city, it's not the size that counts, it's how you use it. That is to say, whereas the famed Sears Tower closes at 8 p.m. (at least during the winter months), you can visit the Hancock Center until 11 at night, and take in the views that were my personal favorites. There's also a section of the observatory called the Skywalk, which is actually an open-air, screened-in area that lets you feel the wind and the pulse of the city 94 floors above street level.

I think I left a piece of my heart in this town.

Sweet home Chicago

Spoiler alert: I made it to L.A. safe and sound a week ago, in case you were wondering. Since then, I've been working on the obvious things - place to live, source of income, and generally settling into this new thing. I do want to finish documenting this trip, though, so I'm going to keep at it in chronological order, with updates as often as I can manage them. Without further ado, then, rewind about three weeks:

If it weren't for the fact that I know a number of my family members read this blog, I might go ahead and say something about how Chicago seems to be trying to compensate for something, given its obsession with skyscrapers.

Oh wait. Guess I'm saying it anyway.

Seriously though. What else is there to say about a city that looks like this?

I suppose Manhattan probably rivals it, but not only is Chicago considered the birthplace of the skyscraper, it is also the only city in the world with more than one completed building standing at 100+ stories. According to Wikipedia, it has the world's tallest skyline, based on the average height of its ten tallest completed buildings.

The problem with a skyscraper-centric city, at least for a tourist, is that the wait-to-payoff ratio is rather large, due to all the potential bottlenecks - at the Sears Tower, for instance, I stood in line about 45 minutes for the security checkpoint, then maybe half an hour to buy a ticket for the elevator, then half an hour for the informational movie about the tower, and then a final twenty minutes to actually get on the elevator. I was glad I rented the little audio tour doodad, since it let me maximize the amount of time I spent actually at the top of the tower - before waiting in line to go back down. But it was worth it; how else are you going to properly appreciate a town of skyscrapers than by seeing it from the top of the tallest one?

Going into it, I really didn't know what to expect from Chicago. I had heard a range of opinions on its balance of big-city and midwestern, and anticipated basically a core of the latter overlaid with a thin veneer of the former. The impression that I got from it, however, was strongly New Yorkish in flavor, but with more...let's see - character? Where New York is all rectilinear canyons of steel and glass, Chicago has the el

and King Lear,

and a river runs through it.

Oh, and the architecture of its financial district has New York's beat all hollow:

All right. More about Chicago coming up soon, hopefully tomorrow, hopefully after I have secured some gainful employment for the next few months. But look! I'm alive!

Friday's trip: 571.6 miles
Friday's time: 9 hours
Total trip: 3316.6 miles

Sunday's trip: 347 miles
Sunday's time: 5:30 hours
Total trip: 3863.2 miles

Monday's trip: 444.4 miles
Monday's time: 7:50 hours
Total trip: 4332.8 miles

Wednesday's trip: 296.3 miles
Wednesday's time: 6:54 hours
Total trip: 4633.0 miles



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Meet me in St. Louis

So this was my first impression of St. Louis:

It wasn't quite that blurry to my actual eyes, although I had never (up to that point) been so happy to see a smear of lights that represented a friend, a bed, and - perhaps most importantly - an end to the interminable darkness that is nighttime in rural Indiana and Illinois. Oy. Oy, I say.

Brace yourselves, BC folks - I think Sarah's new alma mater, WashU, may be an even prettier campus than the Heights. For starters, this is their version of Linden Lane:

They also have a butterfly garden:

How can you beat that?


Didn't see too much of St. Louis proper, but then, Sarah informs me that there's not much of a downtown to see. I did very much like the Loop, which is WashU's stretch of main street populated by funky restaurants, shops, bookstores, etc. Naturally, I managed to not take any pictures of it. But it was cool! I swear!

And then, of course, there's the Arch. I didn't expect this thing to be as compelling as it was, because come on, it's an arch. But it is oddly compelling. For one thing, it's a massive structure that isn't a building. This may seem unremarkable, but it's the first thing that grabs your attention in the skyline, no matter how many times you look up.

For another, the area along the Mississippi is otherwise pretty heavy on the souvenirish nostalgia - cruises on old-fashioned riverboats and so forth. This soaring, irrepressibly modern piece of architecture is all the more striking being juxtaposed against Ol' Man River.

Going up into it was one of the more unnerving tourist experiences I've encountered. You climb into these tiny cars that immediately put you in mind of escape pods on a spaceship:

The photo doesn't do it justice - it's much smaller than it looks. I sat in the far left seat and had to hunch over because of the curve of the wall. To give credit where it's due, the excessive proximity does all but force you to make very quick friends with any strangers in your car.

The string of eight pods then grinds into motion and ratchets you up through the length of one of the legs of the arch, a trip that is allegedly four minutes long but feels considerably longer, especially since there is a little window in the door that lets you count the number of emergency staircases and imagine having to climb down them.

But you reach the top, and after squeezing past the crush of people queued for the pods you've just vacated, you find yourself here:

I'm not sure why, but I was subconsciously expecting there to - somehow - be some sort of normally-proportioned viewing room at the top, but what you see is what you get. Even after the spaceship pods, it's a little claustrophobic. I couldn't help thinking about how I was

above the ground, and the only thing keeping me aloft was a narrow span of metal, and that if there was any mishap I had two ways of getting down - climbing those bajillion stairs, or falling.

It got into my head a little. Obviously.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I went up, because the views were really incredible, as long as you didn't look too far eastward (East St. Louis is a craphole).

And it looks almost as cool from below:

(Yes, Microsoft, I will sell that to you as a sample wallpaper for the next edition of Windows.)

Sarah and I also spent some time being freakishly tall on the banks of the Mississippi

and considered breaking into the courthouse, which was closed for the day, across from the Arch.

We were, however, able to restrain ourselves, despite the delicious irony the prospect offered.

Yay St. Louis! Yay, thank you, Sarah!

Oh wait - I did take one picture of the Loop:

Ding ding ding, went the trolley...