Trip 2005 - Illinois

I have every reason to believe that we were in Iowa when the picture on the left was taken. I am getting this information partly from memory and partly from the map of Iowa behind me. At this point, Tim and I were trading off driving until we were too tired to drive anymore. Both of us were exhausted and couldn't go on anymore, but we were so close to home to give up now. Tim drove throughout the night and through Nebraska and part of Illinois. Around dawn, Tim admitted that he couldn't drive anymore, and we stopped off at an On the Run travel stop I could pick up a large Mountain Dew to help keep me awake until we reached our Dad's house in Addison, Illinois.

We arrived at our Dad's house in Addison around 10:30 in the morning, but our journey certainly wasn't over yet. We said our hellos and goodbyes at the same time, and gave Dad his car back. We thanked him for the use of the car and for letting us have a cross-country adventure on his dollar. We only had 1 1/2 hours to go until we could sleep in our own beds in Milwaukee, but it seemed like it took forever to get home. The last 90 miles were without a doubt the hardest ones of the trip because we knew how close to home we were, but we did it because we had to.

Our Dad asked two things of us in exchange for borrowing his car - take good care of the car and to bring home some pinecones from Lake Tahoe. Well, we didn't take good care of the car because we had to have it serviced in Sacramento because the brakes were bad, and this was the only pinecone that we found, and it was from San Francisco. He didn't want it, but one man's trash is another man's treasure because it looks like part of the male anatomy used in human reproduction. Only someone with a juvenile sense of humor finds something like this to be absolutely hilarious.

Now it has been more than 16 months since we have been home from Trip 2005 and yet only now am I finishing this section on the website. I wish that I could have finished it sooner because now it has little relevance because so much has happened since then. At the time, this trip was huge because it had been a long time since I took a major trip/vacation. As you've seen by some of the other content on this site since May 2005, I have had plenty of other trips/vacations to write home about. But none of them have come close to matching this one content-wise. This trip was one of the most unique experiences that I have had in my life so far, and I certainly hope that there are many more to come in my lifetime. God bless dear readers, and once again I thank you for your commitment to my website and for your patience and understanding of my updating this site. Take care now, and make sure to keep checking back for more of my adventures.