Saturday 10/19/08

Flatlanders

Our visit to Pittsburgh is short and sweet. We get a mid-morning start whistling northwest and back to the last 40 miles of the Pennsylvania turnpike. This may be our longest driving day of the entire trip but we gain an hour when we hit central time so fool ourselves into thinking it won’t be so bad.

The PA turnpike runs right into the Ohio turnpike and the mountains are gone. The next 400 miles will be farms and tractor-trailers providing our entertainment so one of us is hoping to find the Buckeye football network to pass the time. Rats, the game doesn’t start until 3:30. We stop for lunch at a turnpike rest area and are pleasantly surprised to find a Panera where John gets the chipotle chicken sandwich and Mary has a big fat chicken salad sandwich.

We swap driving back and forth and the Buckeye network meets the Michigan State football network so we can hear the whole blow-out if we want. Mary finishes the drive into Chicago, our stop for the next two nights, while John navigates our way to the hotel. Mary has nailed the Palmer House for $75 per night and John parlays that once again into a corner king room on the 17th floor. We both do our jobs again.

It is almost 8:00 as we take a leisurely stroll around the loop thinking that we will just pop into some restaurant for dinner. The first four places tell us that it will be an hour, an hour and a half, etc. We wish we had been in the restaurant business in downtown Chicago. We finally give up at Harry Caray’s and put our name on the waiting list. Mary nails a table in the bar among 200 people who are standing and we sip a beer while we watch two football games and one baseball game. We get a table earlier than promised and John has the Vesuvius Chicken (the menu said it was the best in town) and Mary has a pretty good Spinach Papardelle Pasta with Bolognese sauce. We are so hungry that we could eat anything but this was good.

The streets are still full of people when we leave and it is hard to believe that we are in the middle of a global financial crisis. The economy is pretty good in downtown Chicago on a Saturday night. We hustle back to see the first few minutes of Sarah Palin on SNL, but can’t stay awake for her later appearance.