Chicago. I'll get there eventually.

Not every road I travel is a great road to take. While I tend to always been in a good mood while traveling, no matter how long the drive or flight, there are certain routes that I must take from time to time that drive me absolutely murderous. In the case of the journey between Cincinnati and Chicago, it’s definitely more of a suicidal kind of murder, though.

The drive doesn’t start out bad-it actually starts out quite nicely. Taking I-74 into the sunset can be quite beautiful thing. Once your retinas are sufficiently scarred, you can focus on the beauty of the burning orange sun as it sinks behind the huge green hills of Indiana. As a Florida girl, these hills always seems more on the “mountainous” side of the spectrum, but I’ve been corrected and assured many-a-time that, no, they really are just “big hills.” Once you’re past the hills, however, it begins to look a like Florida-flat. Straight, grey, worn down, flat roads. For hours. And hours.

Indiana is one huge cornfield. The only real break in the monotony is when you hit what my friends and I refer to as, “Turbine Town.” For ten long miles, the highway is surrounded by a massive farm of wind turbines. Shooting out of the ground like silver, anorexic pinwheels, the wind turbines sparked my interested the first few times I made the journey. Every time I strike across Indiana on a trip to Chicago, a try to count the turbines. They’re planted at such a strange angle, though, it makes counting nearly impossible.

The last time I drove through Turbine Town was at around 10 p.m. With no cities around, I knew it would be dark as all get out and my active imagination picture my little grey V-Dub zipping through the black field, lit up with swirling red lights. I imagined something along the lines (Okay, truthfully, I pictured something exactly like) an airplane control panel. Those long, steel arms had to have lights on them, right? Apparently not. The dead blackness held no spinning red lights- only a couple hundred blinking, stationary ones. It could have been beautiful, if I hadn’t pictured something ten times better.

It’s only ten miles, but after making the trek so many times, the ten times of Turbine Town begin to seem like a million. At five miles in I begin picturing the wind turbine’s arms stretching longer and longer, and possibly growing a foot, until finally, they stretch low enough that I can drive my car to the base of one of the turbines and get punted straight into Lincoln Park, Chicago. By eight miles, the feet are gone and the blades are ever longer. All I want to do is lay in the grass beneath the blades, like they’re a modern day guillotine. Sweet Farmer’s Hell, just put me out of my misery.

Even when it ends, you still feel like you’re the midst. There are just less red blinking lights and more blackness. If you stop for gas at the promised, “always clean restrooms,” you open your door to the smell of cow manure. If you’re delirious at that point, you may not realize the reason for the smell. It is due to the dairy farm said restrooms (that are in a BP, and are truly always clean) share a parking lot with. That explains the massive cow out front.

More blackness. More nothingness. And then you hit Chicago. Like that last Smacksgiving hand-to-cheek action, you don’t see in coming until you’re slamming on your brakes to avoid rear-ending a semi, a motorcycle or ten million Lexus SUVs. You’ve made it to the east side of Chi-town- just an hour of sitting in a six-lane parking lot until you reach your hotel. Unless it is baseball season…in which case, you’re an idiot for not coming prepared for a freeway tailgate party. Cause, buddy, you’re parked ‘til October.

PS-Here's a playlist of songs from people that I love or who rock my world. Just a snippet of the few dozen songs I listened to on my way. Starting with the mellow sunset and ending with anything that would keep me awake and pounding on my steering wheel.

*If you click on the little rectangle in the video window, you can scroll through the list of songs.