Getting to New Orleans

Brendan’s cold traveled in a minimized fashion to my nose and throat, and it was good to sleep two nights at Heather’s and Peter’s home in Lake Forest. We attended a wonderful choral and orchestral concert with Heather conducting the orchestra and felt very comfortable staying there. But we needed to press on and get to New Orleans. We planned to visit Brendan’s aunt on the way in Tennessee, but knew we wouldn’t get that far in one day. So we were okay with getting as far as Indianapolis on Monday.

We set out not as early as we should have, perhaps, though it may have made no difference. We needed to walk first to the nearest highway, which was about 3 miles away, and this was a good test of how our packs feel over distance. My shoulders were aching after just a few minutes, but it was doable and will probably become easier the more we do it and the stronger we get.

We got to 41 and got a ride almost immediately from a man on his way to Chicago. He didn’t think we would have much luck getting a ride in Chicago, and he took us a little ways beyond his own destination because he felt it would be a safer spot for us. It was south Chicago, but far beyond downtown and beyond, I think, the neighborhood my parents asked of--“You’re not in south Chicago, are you?”--when I spoke to them yesterday. We were at 111th and Corliss, for anyone who wants to map it.

And at 111th and Corliss no one would give us a ride. We first stood at the entrance to the freeway and then moved to that intersection, which was at a light and caught many people leaving a gas station, and people would occasionally talk to us, but no one would pick us up. Mind you, this was only over the course of about 45 minutes, which in hitchhiking terms in not a very long time. Yet it felt like forever because of the cold.

I’m not totally sure why we didn’t check the weather beforehand. When we first arrived to stay with Katie in Waukegan on Friday, she mentioned it might snow the next day or evening. I think I translated this as “Ah, it might be unusually cold tomorrow, and then it will get a bit warmer again. That’s good.” But it did not get warmer. We were both dressed in nearly all our layers yesterday. Brendan was wearing his sweats and his jeans and every upper piece of clothing but one shirt. I was wearing a tank top, a long johns shirt, a t-shirt, a sweater, a fleece and an outer shell, and wool pants. At first it didn’t seem too too bad. But the cold quickly seeped in, first hitting our hands, which only had thin gloves on, so we took turns holding our “Nashville, TN” sign. Then it seemed to sneak under my jacket and cool my stomach, and I guess that’s how it eventually found its way to my feet, and that was the final straw because there was no getting warm after that.

So we gave up rather quickly, and I really did feel like a failure for a while. This was to be our first attempt to hithchike on this trip, and hitchhiking is to be our primary means of travel. But the cold beat us. And that’s okay. It’s why we’re traveling south anyway, to keep away from the cold, so we just found a faster way to do that. We called my parents and my dad used his internetting skills to tell us the way to get to the Greyhound station in Chicago. We thought we would have to take a bus to the L and the L to downtown, but things worked out more serendipitously. We took the bus to the L station, and lo and behold there stood a Greyhound station. It was a teeny one, but it fit our needs, and we were able to book passage all the way to New Orleans. As I write this we are on the bus and most recently went through Memphis, TN. It’s warmer already and there are many more leaves on the trees here than there were in WI and IL.

And that is all for now. Perhaps Brendan will relate the story of the woman we met while waiting for our bus, or else I’ll come back to that.