Alright, I finally have the internet at home so I thought I’d actually write something while relaxing a little bit tonight.
So this weekend really started on Thursday night when Steve and I went to see Revenge of the Sith, but I’ll talk about that at a later date. One thing that I found out today that I thought was pretty interesting is that the first four days of the movie being out are all in the top 15 single grossing days of all time, with the opening day being the biggest opening day and biggest single day ever. Crazy Star Wars fans. Though it helped that it was actually a good movie.
Anyway, after the movie I came home to gather some of the stuff I’d need to be taking to Chicago. I left the house the next morning at about 7:30am. Luckily the traffic wasn’t bad all the way around the Cities. I got over to Inver Grove Heights to pick up Tim without any problem. The only problem was that Tim was about 30 minutes late to our meeting spot. I found out later it was because he had been out boozing the night before, so it was understandable.
The drive down actually went pretty quickly. The drive to Tim’s parent’s house near Milwaukee took 4-5 hours. We hadn’t seen each other in more than 5 years so we were able to pretty much talk the entire way down. We got to his parent’s house where we had a bite to eat and also grabbed his hockey equipment. Before leaving town, though, we headed to the hockey shop he frequented his whole life to get our skates sharpened…for free. So that wasn’t too bad.
Oh, I almost forgot. Somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin we attracted the attention of a snaggle toothed hitchhiker. He said he was in town from Milwaukee for a child support hearing and his car had been towed and the child support hearing had only lasted 15 minutes and now he needed a ride towards Milwaukee or some money for a bus ticket. Unfortunately we just didn’t have any room in the car for him. Hopefully he was able to get back home.
Finally we headed out and toward Chicago. We were almost to the hotel–just getting off the tollway when I accidentally went into the IPass lane. The IPass is an electronic device they have for the tollways in Chicago. People put money on them like a debit card and they don’t have to stop at the tolls–the money gets automatically deducted when they pass through. Needless to say, I don’t have an IPass. I had my 50 cents out and everything, but had no where to throw it, I started backing up but some cars came so I just drove through. I hope they don’t send me a ticket.
The worst traffic of the whole trip was on the two roads leading to the hotel. It took us maybe 20 minutes to go maybe 3 miles.
I’ll tell you about the first night next time–for now, I need some sleep.
