Family Road Trips to Chicago Area

Another one of our regular family car rides was to visit cousins living near Chicago.  As a drive-through Pennsylvania on Route 80 we would find that once we passed the mountains he was frequently nothing but cornfields for hours on end.  These cornfields would occasionally be broken by small towns and the perpetual construction that seemed to be going on route 80. it only seemed that they would start construction at the east end of Route 80 in Pennsylvania and continued until they hit the border with Ohio and then they would just start again from eastern end all over again. It got so bad that we would joke that it was the “Law of Conservation of Construction.”

On one of the trips my cousin convinced several of us to go to a showing of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” having never seen it my brother and I agreed. Then we found out a number of things we had never expected. First was the trip to the supermarket for toilet paper and rice, but because they were out of small bags of rice my cousin picked up a packet of instant chicken and rice soup. Then we went to the theater, where it appears that my cousin used to be one of the people performing in front of the screen during showings of the movie.

Without telling the rest of us, during the performance, she and my brother proceeded to throw the chicken and rice soup powder into the hair of the guys in front of us. They then proceeded to fill an empty popcorn bucket with water and toss it onto them. Through out the movie they taunted and tricked these guys to the point that when we left the theater the group of us had to run to avoid getting into a fight.

Another thing I noticed in Chicago was the traffic circles. In other places these are large round sections of road usually with a grass section in the middle. In Chicago some of these are paved, and people go across the middle without warning. Needless to say this causes more than a little confusion similar to the woman in Boston who was driving slowly as she approached an intersection and stuck her left arm out the window and rotated her hand for several minutes. It took us a few miles to realize she was not signaling a left turn, but was drying her nails.