Day 6

Yeesh...I'm behind.

Friday.

I scrambled most of the day to get ready to go to Wisconsin. First I had to work this morning for three hours. Which was brutal considering my marathon paper writing on Thursday. But I pulled it off with a little help from my good friend Caffeine. After work I went home and did a bunch of menial little stuff to finish the assignment I spent Thursday working on. Then I went to the post office to mail it, the bank, and got my oil changed. I realize that these are all very exciting details of my life that everyone has pretty much been dying to find out. Now you know.

In between all of this I did catch a few peeks at the Cubs game. It started bad with the Cubs trailing 9-1. Then they put a bunch of subs into the game and just went ape shit and ended up winning the game. This, of course, slowed me down quite a bit in my packing for the weekend. When my good friend Seth arrived at about 4:00 (top of the 8th) I realized I still had more to do than I hoped.

Then came the LONG drive to Door County. Traffic is a bitch. Instead of taking 294 I just shot up Route 83. Down the road a ways I saw a sign for 294 and decided we were probably past the worst of the traffic so now would be a good time to get on the freeway. What followed was one of the oddest experiences in the history of travel:

I cannot do justice to the absurdity of this road...here is a picture of it. Even the map fails to really grasp the pointlessness of it. What happened was we turned right and found that each side of the road was split into two halves separated by a median. If you were in the right lane you could not move to the left one...and vice versa. Until we came to the stoplight. Then there were literally (Seth counted) twenty different options of things you could do. We elected to stay on the right side of the road since it was where we were already. Bad idea. After moving along parallel to the left side for a ways, the right side of the road inexplicably sloped upwards, took a sharp left turn, AND CROSSED OVER ALL THE OTHER LANES OF TRAFFIC! Then, another sharp left turn, AND BACK IN THE SAME WAY WE CAME! We ended up exactly where we started, heading in the exact opposite direction. We nicknamed it the Iraq War Memorial Parkway for this reason.

But what really gets me about this road is that there is absolutely no reason that anyone ever would consciously use this road. It is literally a road to nowhere. And to think taxpayer dollars actually went into building and maintaining this road just blows my mind. I blame George W. Bush.

Why do I blame Bush? Because I am a follower and it is very cool at the moment to blame George Bush for everything that ever happens anywhere. When I went to the Autism Walk I stopped at a BP near Soldier Field to use the bathroom, only to be alerted by the elderly, African-American security guard that the BP employees reserved the right to keep their restrooms off limits to the public. I was very disappointed but the security guard assured me that he didn't really blame the employees. This is what he said, "People go in there and boo boo on their hands and wipe it on the walls and then the employees have to clean it up. And now on top of that you have Bush in the White House fucking up the economy." Which was my favorite thing maybe all month...George W. Bush taking the blame for people "boo booing" on their hands and wiping it on the wall. BRILLIANT! What else can we blame him for?

ANYWAY...we finally just got back on 83 after what turned out to be about a 20 minute loop (it took this long because you can imagine how long a red light takes when there are twenty different options for drivers.) We finally did find a road that took us to the highway though and then we were cruising. And it turned out that we made it to Delafield, WI, where our friend Ellis manages an Applebee's, at the perfect time. We went to the grocery store and made purchases for the party, then over to the Applebee's for dinner, and finished up right about the time Ellis got off work. We stopped for gas and we were on the road to Door County by about 9:15.

This was a LONG trip but a pretty fun one with good company. Highlights included heat lightning and some meth heads at a gas station in Manitowoc. They looked like they were enjoying their evening! By the time we got lost in Door County, WI it was about 12:30. Go Mapquest! We crossed a bunch of roads with names like "Cemetery Lane" and "Dead End." It really felt like we were in the beginning of a horror movie. Luckily I don't believe in all those old legends! (sounded funnier in person)

These are the people who were at Bill's Cabin for Paul's bachelor party:

Paul
Bill
Dan
Mike
Jesse
Ellis
Steve
Jim
Seth

I think there was someone else inside the house.

So we stayed up and hung out around the fire until about 4:30. At one point, around 3 or so, Mike and Jesse up and left to go back to Green Bay because they both had plans in the morning. But the Andrews side of the party (Ellis, Seth, Paul, Me) kept the party raging, trying to pick the top ten comments people from our group made over the years. Then we crashed...

TO BE CONTINUED!!!