Day 42: Travel day
Welcome
Yesterday we drove from Kalamazoo to Chicago.
It was a mere 230km that we had to travel, and we had an entire day to do it. At 11am we got on the road, heading west on I94 towards Lake Michigan. A plan was formed as we drove, and this involved eating breakfast and then having a swim. On the way to the beach, we stopped at The Peasant Pantry, a bakery with a nice selection of pastries and other grab-and-go foods, where I selected three items to ingest. I started with a honey-carrot, herb, and goat cheese pastry and followed it up with a strawberry and hazelnut triangular pastry, and then an apricot yoghurt parfait.
The proximity of the interstate to the water is not given away when you drive this route along the southeast shores of Lake Michigan, as a thick belt of trees lines each side. It was a breath-taking sight that greeted us once we left the highway and passed through this endless thicket, heading down a driveway that took us Warren Dunes State Park and emerging into a landscape that was more reminiscent of New Zealand’s Northland than what we imagined of a continental lake-shore. We passed tall sand dunes that transitioned into a coastal forest and then arrived at a pristine white sand beach that gradually sloped down into the choppy water of the lake. The central United States is currently experiencing a severe heatwave and yesterday when we arrived at the beach the temperature was around 36°C (97°F), a perfect incentive to jump straight into the water. This was my first time swimming in a Great Lake and it was a bit jarring diving into a liquid after possessing an expectation of intense saltiness and then being denied the usual saline nasal cleanse and sodium film on your skin. The water was beautiful though, warmer than the alpine lakes of Te Waipounamu (NZ’s south island) that we are used to and perfectly refreshing.
It would have been easy to spend an entire afternoon at this pristine spot but we had a few errands in Chicago that were time sensitive. We set off again in our Ford Transit 350, our tired old van that we weren’t terribly fond of by this point. Some of the highways in Michigan and Illinois can get a bit bumpy and our suspension, completely rinsed from hundreds of thousands of miles of touring wasn’t doing much of a job of preventing these bumps from making their way up into the passenger compartment.
We were happy to see the Chicago skyline not only because it is one of the country’s more spectacular cityscapes but also because it meant that soon we would be parting ways with this vehicle. Our first errand was dropping our equipment at the Salt Shed, our venue for the next day’s festival show. This meant that we could get rid of our trailer and this was also a satisfying task, ditching our cumbersome tail that had hindered parking and manoeuvring for the past week. The final errand was visiting Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams where we each chose a pair of delicious flavours from their selection and ate them combined with a freshly made waffle cone.
A view of the one of Chicago’s most iconic buildings the Bruce Willis Tower as seen from our hotel.
It hadn’t cooled very much when we headed out for our evening activity. I remember checking my phone at one point, it could have been around 8 or 9pm and it was still around 33°C (91°F) [530 fentigrade]. We headed to a bar next to Logan Square in northwest Chicago where our friends from the band Ratboys were having an album release party. They had a whole food and drink menu created for this event with beverages like Rat Juice and Ratón-limón, and rat-themed burgers with names that escape my memory. Rat and Cheese, or Double Rat Spicy Deluxe are names that I came up with when I tried to remember, but these are wrong and the original names have been lost to the sands of time.
After listening to the brand new record and enjoying some great food it was time for the night to move into the next phase which was a long and intense karaoke session. There were some great performances and some not so great performances, all of which were enthusiastically enjoyed by the crowd in this bar. I can reveal that one of the members of The Beths sang a very convincing performance of a Shakira song but currently the recording of this performance is only available to Breakfast and Travel Updates Premium members.