PART ONE
SUNDAY, JUNE 22 8:47 PM
I left Champaign at around 5:00 PM. I had the diabolical plan to skip the toll booths and three interstate changes in the Chicagoland area by cutting across to I-55 at Kankakee. This plan actually worked pretty well except for the small fact that Google Maps blows. As I have previously encountered, Google Maps doesn’t much care for things like unidentified forks in the road and whatnot. The directions say to turn left on Stripmine Road (no strip mines in sight…). This wouldn’t be a problem except…
1) The road isn’t marked. It’s a T-intersection, so I *have* to go left, I guess. Or, I could stop at that Ben Franklin store straight ahead of me. I seriously thought these all went out of business years ago. Maybe I had fallen into some sort of time vortex. Anyhoo….
2) I can turn left and immediately fork left (unmarked) or fork right (IL-53). My directions don’t mention IL-53, so I fork left. Wrong choice. I end up in Braidwood, Illinois. [Reconsulting the map shows I should have forked left. Typical.]
Ending up in Braidwood is not a crisis, it’s on Interstate 55. I park in a grocery store parking lot to consult my Blackberry’s Google Maps application (BTW, this application has saved my ass several times now after the web Google Maps failed me) . I reorient myself and locate the interstate, the exit for which is extremely well hidden in a residential area.
Eventually I get to the hotel. It’s pretty weird. It’s about a half-mile off the main road and is situated on the edge of some woodlands. It kinda looks likes a castle. I am not encouraged by the two Lisle police cruisers out front, but that turned out to be a hotel employee filing a complaint about a truck of some sort. Dunno. I find my room in the West Tower after navigating some serpentine hallways. The room is *tiny*. Really small. So is the TV. So is the bathroom. It’s actually kinda claustrophobic. If I look out the window, all I see are trees. I guess I’ll get used to it since I’m here for six nights. There is a common lounge just outside my room. That’s weird too. The soda and ice machines are just sitting in the lounge too. I wish I brought my camera. Now I have a rockin’ headache and I want to go home.
PART TWO
MONDAY, JUNE 23 6:48 PM
Well, the morning commute wasn’t too bad. Mine clocked in at around 12 minutes with entirely manageable traffic (but this was all surface streets). Other suckers had commutes of anywhere from 45-minutes to an hour and a half (from Evanston). Yuck. If I ever move to a big metro area I will certainly try to go somewhere with a good mass transit system (preferably trains). Driving bites. When class was over the commuters were mourning the drive back. Suckers.
Class was actually not bad. It seemed to go a lot faster than the classes in Champaign. The instructor kept things moving and was pretty engaging. Fun facts about Ralph, the instructor:
- Hobbies include rowing, sailing, and fishing
- Once caught a 52” wolf eel
- Has lived through just about every kind of natural disaster in his lifetime (never a typhoon, did experience a huge swarm of locusts and the big Alaskan earthquake)
- Has worked for NASA and Harvard
and the kicker
- Claims to have invented the ESCAPE key, but a Google search can’t confirm this
After I got back, I took a longer than expected walk because some genius decided to erect a fence which was overgrown with questionable weeds between the hotel and the source of food. So, I had to walk around the fence and probably racked up about two miles. Nice. Now I’m watching American Gladiators married couples edition. Later I’ll be researching my itinerary for the rest of the week, which probably includes a movie (maybe, there’s an IMAX just south of here but it’s showing Kung-Fu Panda (there are regular screens too)), an IKEA trip and, um, well, there’s no much else to do around here.
PART THREE
TUESDAY, JUNE 24 8:46 PM
Today’s class went pretty well. We went over how to edit and publish database schemas and learned how to edit and publish new forms with the web screen painter which was actually kind of fun. Everyone is the class except me managed to break their software suite at least once. Hopefully no one noticed my smugness as I browsed the internet for 20 minutes while the instructor made repairs.
After class I trekked down to the nearest Portillo’s to get an Italian beef sandwich. Portillo’s is a place that I hear quite a bit about, mostly from suburbanites. I had actually been to one once but I couldn’t recall if it was actually any good. Today’s meal must have been good because I ordered and was done eating in 10 minutes (with no ill effects, I might add). I’m not usually hungry when I’m away from home, but this time around I am. Tomorrow I’ll probably locate the Thai restaurant that Google Maps found for me and maybe do some Wii Fit stalking.
PART FOUR
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25 7:22 PM
Class is now more than half over. That’s cool. Nothing much happened there today. After class I located a well-reviewed Thai restaurant and had some tasty pad thai and of course, crab rangoon (or crab lagoon as they were called on the menu). While they were not even close to Thara Thai in terms of overall quality, they were still pretty good. The sweet and sour sauce was better and the wrapper was good, but there wasn’t nearly enough filling. Probably the second or third best ranked, but can’t even sniff the #1 rank. I also didn’t find a WiiFit at Woodridge Target. Jerks.
Well, I obviously didn’t wrap this up very well. Sorry!
