I love traveling, but by far my least favorite part is the head rush hangover that washes over you as soon as you get back home and back to reality. After spending four days in Chicago last week I was on cloud nine, now I feel groggy, like when you snap out of a really lovely daydream in the middle of something you probably should have been paying attention to.
It's probably an unpopular opinion, but I absolutely love road trips. I don't even mind the moment you make your first stop to stretch your legs and it feels like every muscle in the lower half of your body has frozen in place when you touch the ground. I don't care if the view from the car window is nothing but trees and corn fields for most of the trek because nothing beats those random, weird family conversations born out of boredom and the need for entertainment. It doesn't hurt if you have a good true crime podcast queued up to get you through either. There's nothing that says family fun more than listening to a conversation about murder together. There's something about traveling somewhere new, or just somewhere away from home, that gives me this feeling of inspiration, and the kind of attitude where I know I can take on anything. I browsed through bookshelves at this charming indie bookstore in Evanston, Illinois called Bookends & Beginnings one night after we'd left the city, thinking about a book idea I've been chewing on for a while. Why have I been putting off writing all this time? I don't have a good answer and it just pisses me off to think about it. There is no single good reason why I haven't been sitting my ass down at my laptop and typing until my brain runs out of ideas and plot points. I'm quite literally the only thing holding myself back from something I so desperately want to do. The name of the little bug on my shoulder is self-doubt, I won't deny that. As we walked down the streets of Evanston on our first night, admiring the stretch of beach along Lake Michigan, everything troubling me and tossing around in my brain for months didn't seem to matter so much anymore. It was pretty clear, like a junebug to the face clear, that my troubles don't deserve as much brain power as I've been giving them. I'm so used to little things being boiled into big things by my anxiety that it almost felt foreign to be able to let go for a while. We wandered through Northwestern University's beautiful campus for a while before heading back to our hotel in town. Interestingly enough, the memory from that day that stands out the most to me was a dozen bicycles abandoned at various back racks outside campus buildings. It was an odd image with rust cracking through paint and wheels missing. I drank beer we'd stashed in our own cooler at the hotel that night and we ordered a pizza at almost ten o'clock. Possibly the best New York style pizza I've had came from a bar in a suburb North of Chicago. I read a few chapters of People We Meet on Vacation and dreamt that I was dating Robert Downey Jr. I'm not joking about that last bit either; the brain is a mystery. We caught a train to Wrigley Field that morning, for a tour my mom was antsy to get to (rightly so), and met a man raising his son on his own. He told us about the abortion his son's mother wanted and the three day hospital stay alone after the birth. He spoke of struggle and frustration, but mostly of the love he has for his son. I can only imagine the other stories strangers share on trains. All afternoon I imagined myself living in a city with so many people, something I was convinced I could never see myself doing until a few days ago. I knew in a couple days I would get to see Wrigleyville packed with Cubs fans, but when the team is out of town it's a quiet neighborhood right next to the L train. Everything looked different than the last time I stood in the same spot almost 11 years ago. New buildings mostly. Brand new, shiny buildings standing in stark contrast to everything else around them. Then there's Wrigley Field, the second-oldest stadium in Major League Baseball, the same old friendly confines. I pocketed some ivy trimmings on our tour and sat in the dugout where so many famous Cubs have graced the benches. What it must be like to watch a game from that spot. I can now say I've seen the world's most complete T. rex fossil at the field museum, and plenty taxidermied specimens too. Who knew there were so many different species of birds in the world? Four hours, it turns out, isn't enough time to spend in a museum that big. My inner seven-year-old was equally parts over the moon and creeped out to see real mummies inside a glass case. I probably shouldn't have know what canopic jars were before I turned ten, but my grandma let me watch The Mummy (1999) as a kid. I promptly developed an obsession with all things relating to Egypt and fell in love with Brendan Fraser in quick succession. This trip had been a long time coming, and it only seemed fitting for my mom to celebrate her birthday sitting in the crowd at Wrigley Field watching the Cubs play on home turf. I drank three beers and had my first, but definitely not my last, Chicago dog. Our entire vacation led up to the surreal moment where the whole crowd rose onto their feet, beers and beef hot dogs in hand, while the W flew high over the city of Chicago. We got to see our favorite Cubs play for what quite possibly could be the last time as soon as this week. Player trades are a bitch, and I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Chicago, for being so damn good to me.
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