Sep 8th : The drive from Minneapolis

This trip was a birthday treat from my husband. Since we both loved traveling so much, we decided that we should travel out somewhere outside to celebrate the day. We decided that we should do small road trip of about 5-7 hrs and we checked out all the places where we could visit. We finally decided on Chicago as we had heard so much about it and it was about 6 1/2 hr drive from Minneapolis which also suited us very well. He took a day off on Monday and we were all set to go on our trip. We rented a car from Enterprise and booked acco in Motel 6 and we were off on Friday evening 5:30 pm on 94W.
Since I am very new to driving, we decided that I should start first and then during the later part of the day, he would take over from me. By the time we were in Wisconsin it started raining heavily and it had gotten real dark. We were also in a heavy truck traffic area. To top all this, there was about 12 miles of road work and I should tell you -it was one of my scariest drives. :) We had initially decided to stop at Madison, WI for dinner but we reached there only by 10 pm and knew that all the restaurants would be closed. So we continued to drive and at around 11 pm, we took an exit and had veggie delites at Subway- From here it was my hubby's drive and after crossing a zillion (no, actually 3 tolls) we managed to enter Chicago at 12:15 am. But the most difficult part of the journey was yet to come. We did not have a map of Chicago and Map Quest had let us down with directions. And so after 3-4 calls to the motel and searching nearly 40 miles around Schaumburg, we managed to find our motel. It was around 1 am when we finally hit the bed that day. Scary, tiresome but thoroughly enjoyable drive that was!