Random bits and pieces from Chicago.

From the highway in Kentucky you can see antebellum barns and one lane roads winding parallel to quiet streams; horses bound along just out of view and blue hills roam along. But the highway itself blasts through the countryside, little deterred from its mission to carry weary people quickly from one town to the next.
And honestly, when you’re driving 13 hours from central North Carolina straight through to Chicago all you really want to do is get there. Were this trip simply about the travel it would be my single-minded desire to seek out the unturned stones of the shores of the midwestern prairie ocean. But I really want to be where I’m going. All of us do, but at the same time we’re all seeking distraction from the boredom these roads breed. Families pass eating burgers and talking between the rows of minivan seating. Couples go by, one asleep the other softly drumming on the steering wheel in time with unheard music. The vehicles are like disconnected train cars, all sharing a track and destination but hurtling there at wildly different paces.

On my first car trip to Washington, DC, I remember the feeling of being in farmland one minute and quite literally staring down the Pentagon the next. That sort of unsubtle progression is what the American highway is all about. From barren desert to Las Vegas in minutes; from midwestern Prairie to the shore of Lake Michigan in seven exits or less. It gets us there but it hardly makes us mindful of the lives of early explorers, for whom there were no quick revelations of urban scenery to contrast with the endless swaths of green.

Experiencing these cities themselves is almost better; stand at the corner of 7th and Pennsylvania SE at rush hour on a Friday and think about how fast you could be looking at cows. A thirty-five minute drive to the south will allow you that privilege. From Waveland Ave. In Chicago to the Dells–and all the cheese and farmland you could ever want–is barely an hour.