A Trip To Chicago

Ah, Chicago. The land of my youth. Around once a year, we like to make a pilgrimage back to the Mother Country to see how the locals are fairing up north. So, at the end of the June, we loaded up the old Family Truckster and made the journey once again. Now, people often ask me, "Brad, why is it that you always drive to Chicago? Why not fly? I mean, how long does that take you anyway?"

Well, the answers I could give vary anywhere from "It's cheaper for us to drive, and deep down, we're very frugal people," to "It's Gruetzmacher family tradition to always drive on long trips." The truth though is much simpler. We love the American highway system. This beautiful engineering phenomenon allows us travel great distances in very little time while at once being able to see the majesty of this country. We're not like some pretentious Northeastern snobs who refer to the Mid-West as "fly-over country." No. We call that Driving-through country. The wonders of Charleston, West Virginia. The dazzle of Dayton, Ohio. They are all simply breathtaking. It's so wonderful, that we take what would normally be a 16 hour trip and break it up in to two days worth of driving just so we can take it all in. That way we see everything we wouldn't have seen had we flown. Did you know that there was some awesome wind turbine farms just north of Indianapolis? No, because you flew right over it.

This was also our first long trip with a child who is now potty trained. That makes it a completely different kind of trip entirely. We're working on teaching her that if she needs to use the potty, she needs to give us a warning instead of just blurting out, "I NEED TO GO POTTY NOW!!!!!" Though, because of this, we saw some small, out of the way towns along the way that we probably wouldn't have seen otherwise.

It was also our first trip in which Kasia discovered the phrase, "Are we there yet?" We weren't more than three hours out before Kasia started up with this phrase. And she would use it over, and over again, as I'm sure any parent is well familiar with. I feel like we can now be let in to the Car Club With Kids. It was driving me to the point where I almost thought that we should fly from now on.