Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 9

Let me preface this post by explaining that David and I hate road trips... a lot. Any distance over two hours is too long for us. However, we love our dog... a lot. Knowing that we'd be gone a minimum of 2 weeks, probably longer, we just couldn't see ourselves leaving her behind for that long. So we made the ultimate sacrifice and in saying yes to our beagle Allie, we said yes to an 18 hour drive in December. Like I said, we really love our dog.

We left the house around 6:30 Saturday morning. After quick stops for Caribou, breakfast, and gas, we were on our way. The roads weren't great for the first couple of hours but they were "good enough." Once the sun rose it made travel a little more challenging as it produced an awful glare on the wet roads for quite a while. We crossed into Illinois just before noon and our first stop was at a Road Ranger gas station to purchase an IPass. As soon as we returned to the car I called the 800 number on the box to register our unit. After all, the whole reason we purchased it was to drive on the toll road with greater ease. After being on the phone with Jerod (with the emphasis on the -od) (I don't mean he was odd; the emphasis really was on the -od of his name) for about 20 minutes, he concluded that we couldn't actually use the IPass since we didn't have permanent plates on our Outlook yet. (Remember we'd only taken posession of our vehicle just days before this trip). I could give him the plates for our Neon and that got things moving a little until I reminded him that we weren't presently driving the Neon. The number on our temporary plates had a different amount of characters than he could type into his system so he really couldn't help us. However, he did assure us that we could go ahead and use it and then once our permanent plates arrived we could call back and they would credit us any fees we'd been charged for using an invalid IPass. Well enough... I wrote down his name, and we decided to give it a shot. Except for the next toll booth we approached wouldn't raise the gate for us so we still had to shell out the $3.00 cash anyway. We gave up and just paid cash for the remaining tolls through and around Chicago.

The weather going through Chicago got horrible, by the way...

We were bound and determined to make the most of the situation and reward ourselves with Portillos hot dogs for lunch. And even though it took us entirely too long to find one "along the way", we did in fact get our Portillos for lunch. Yes, we inhaled them since our dog was waiting for us in the Outlook during somewhat of a blizzard, but we did get our Portillos hot dogs.

By 4:20 we'd hit the half-way point for our trip. 499 miles down, 497 to go. For some reason this wasn't that encouraging to us. After being on the road for so long, surely we must have been more than half-way there!