Racing the bomb cyclone on a 13-hour drive from Maryland to Chicago
I suppose My Lovely Wife and I could have flown to Chicago to spend the holidays with her sister and our oldest daughter, but we were taking along our neurotic rescue dog,, an eight-pound mutt — the 80-pound Archie wasn’t going to fit under an airplane seat. It seemed easier to put the pooch in the back of the Kia and point the car west.But a long drive isn’t something to take lightly, especially in the dead of winter.
We didn’t want to succumb to “get-home-itis.” That’s what my father calls it when your good sense is overwhelmed by the desire toGet-home-itis can cause people to make bad decisions. It happened in my dad’s line of work as an Air Force pilot. Pilots would die not in combat but on cross-country training flights when they didn’t want to lose precious time by going around a thunderstorm or by landing to refuel. They’d push it.
Ohio turns out to be much wider than it should be, but transiting it was fairly uneventful. So, too, with Indiana, home of the RV Hall of Fame. The worst traffic was on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive, where a great river of white headlights in one direction and red brake lights in the other was almost festive.Once we were safely in Evanston, we hunkered down. The snow, when it came, wasn’t much, only about 3 inches. The cold was bitter, though, and so was the wind.