Chicago Tales: Getting There

We drove to Chicago.

It was 16 hours (ugh!) but infinitely cheaper than flying four people there and back. All four of us took turns driving so that helped out on the load.

Also, our family does well on car trips together. Because, you know, we like each other's company.

We all prepared mightily for the trip. Tom had a Gilbert & Sullivan track ready for us as we pulled out of the driveway (that will only make sense to people who love The Simpson's episode where they move to Terror Lake as much as we do). We completely cracked up over that surprise.

I had various podcasts ready ... to see which were hits, you can check out Forgotten Classics where they all get a mention in the latest episode.

Rose had various song mixes which she had prepared for her camping trip in west Texas. We chose ones with names like "Happy" or "Summer" or "Jazz & Blues" and very carefully avoided the "Alternative" mix CD.

Also I bought Barguments. It provided us with three solid hours of laughter and good-natured arguments. We got through about half of the book and probably will embark upon the rest when we return in August to move Rose to college.

Sample questions that provided a good deal of conversational fodder:

You're stuck in an elevator for two hours. Would you rather be alone or with a stranger? (Can you believe I was the only person who would rather have been alone?)

Name the five best bands of all time. (This sparked much conversation but none of us were so dedicated to only five bands that we could produce a definitive list.)

If you could collect royalties from any single invention, which would you choose? (I picked Post-It notes)

We discovered that none of us cares enough for alcohol to make any questions like "Choose whether to give up wine or chocolate for life" interesting at all. We easily surrendered alcohol.

Every book like this has a few tasteless questions but this did not have many and whoever was reading simply skipped them. Highly recommended.