Tuesday, Aug. 17th Day 40, 5437 miles
We are writing to you from a KOA campground in Nashville that was under 13 feet of water last May. We sent out a batch of pictures but it has been more than a week since Robin's last dispatch. We have covered a lot of ground in that time and so it's time to get crackin'. First, a little history....
After Mackinaw City, our next Hamfest destination was Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. A sick water heater on the bus forced us to make a detour, however, to North Chicago, a suburb of Chicago proper. There, we took the bus to Liberty Coach, the factory where it was originally built. We decided to take the opportunity to hop in the jeep and tour the city while the bus was being repaired.
For advice, we called our own Chicago expert, Susan Fynmore. She had a bunch of great suggestions. We would have one whole day to spend in the city before having to return to the Liberty factory to spend the night on our bus, parked in their barbed wire fenced parking lot. This was probably the our least appealing camping spot of the entire trip, but on the positive side, we had good electricity, which hasn't always been the case. Somehow we managed for two whole nights, sleeping in an industrial parking lot, a destiny that I had previously hoped would never befall me. It was only after the second night that we learned that the Jelly Belly factory across the street had a shift change at midnight. We wondered what all the late night commotion was, but it proved to be a generally peaceful spot.
As for downtown Chicago, the city was interesting, the surrounding neighborhoods were really pretty but the traffic was awful and the toll roads were irritating and expensive when driving the bus. Some toll fees were only 80 cents but the lines leading up to them sometimes backed up traffic for miles. It seems like a stupid system to us. Why don't they just raise the gas tax a penny and be done with it? Also, when you shell out hard cash for the privilege to drive on a stretch of highway, you tend to expect that all of those riches that they collect are spent to provide modern, well maintained roads. Well, let me tell you, they're flushing that money down the toilet because we didn't see any decent road maintenance whatsoever. In other parts of the country they call it a shakedown: here, it's a Toll Road. Same difference.
We read in the paper that the city recently signed a contract with a private company to build, maintain, manage, run, and police their parking meters. At first, this sounds like just your ordinary outsourcing contract until further in the article you learn that the contract was let for 75 years! The city expects to collect 1.5 billion dollars from the deal. The parking meter company, which also issues tickets, is said to collect some 74 million dollars a year from their meters. I don't know about you, but the deal sounds fishy to us, especially since it will be the grandchildren of the guys who put this deal together that will still be lining their pockets. Sweet home Chicago.
Once downtown, however, it turns out that parking cost more than driving. We drove along Lake Shore Drive admiring the shoreline and the impressive city architecture. After navigating the downtown streets for a while with our trusty but sometimes schizophrenic GPS unit, we parked to go up into the Willis (nee Sears) Tower. At $28 plus tip for parking, we made sure that we walked around and gawked at the tall buildings for a while to get our money's worth. It was about $l5.00 each to go up to the 102nd floor of the tower and we thought it was worth the wait and the dough. It was very well run with lots of interesting facts and trivia to read while waiting in line for the elevators. I'd say it is one of those must do things in Chicago. Susan advised us not to go if the sky was cloudy but we lucked out, it was a beautiful day and we got some great pictures.
Coming down from the tower, we grabbed a Starbucks, retrieved our car and headed down the shoreline to the Museum of Science and Industry. There, we spent another $16.00 to park plus $28.00 per person to go inside. We wished we had had more time for this place. As adults alone, it could easily take 5 hours to see everything. With kids, plan on spending the day. We barely skimmed the place but did get to spend time for a special tour of the World War Two Nazi submarine, U-501. The U-boat tour alone took about an hour and a half but was well worth the history lesson. It is truly an impressive artifact and one of the star attractions of the museum.
We returned “home” to North Chicago only to find that the bus was not quite ready. This meant yet another night in the industrial parking lot but we were now much better prepared for the experience. The next day we drove into the town of Libertyville in search of some cigars and some public WiFi where Fred could login and do some work. We thought that the Libertyville public library was probably a good bet but we had no such luck. It was closed for massive renovations. There was a small farmers market / street fair nearby so I left Fred on a park bench while I did some shopping. I was happy, Fred, not so much. He met a farmer with a tractor on display and the next day the guy emailed him and said he was going to get his ham radio license and buy a subscription to QRZ.com. You just never know what is going to happen when you look up from your computer and mingle with the locals! Lesson learned I hope.
We left Chicago feeling like we had a good taste of the place and headed for our next ham-fest in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky.
For more pictures of this dispatch, see our Picasa Web Album
from the road:
-fred..... and a little bit of robin
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