Chicago

Todd and I have spent the last couple of days in Chicago and today we are heading out, with a destination of Dayton, Ohio. So it'll be a long drive. It's amazing how many friends we have in the Midwest, though: Carrie and Erik, who just moved to Chicago from San Francisco, were nice enough to put us up. Janet, a Chicago native, acted as our tour guide of the city yesterday. We visited Erin and Jason in Milwaukee, in their fabulous new house (they just moved there from Boston). Today we will go to Indiana to see Greg and Cheryl, and then on to Ohio, to see Lou, Michelle, Geoff, and Melissa. Knowing so many people makes me feel a little less far from home, even though the fact that we can visit all of them means that we are far from home. A strange contradiction.

People who have lived in or near Chicago have told me what a huge city it is. I've seen it on a map and thought it looked huge. But it's not until being here that I really got it. It can take a looong time to get from one part of the city from another. It's a bit overwhelming. And even the downtown isn't as walkable as one might imagine. I keep contrasting it to Portland, Oregon in my head, which is a much smaller city in terms of population and also more compact. It seems like such an opposite kind of city.

Our visit to Chicago felt like such a whirlwind, and the city was so huge, that I don't really even know what else to say about it. Carrie and Erik live in a great neighborhood with tree-lined streets and in an amazingly huge apartment for a really reasonable rent, which reminds me how expensive the Bay Area is. So why do I miss it?

I'm getting to that point in this vacation where I think I'd like to sleep in my own bed for a change and not have to keep hauling my luggage around. I'm feeling like if someone wants to break into our car and steal some of our stuff, that would be fine with me. Hey, I'll pick things out to give them! I'm starting to want to go home. Or just know where home is. Of course, I don't know where home is, since I no longer live in home as I've known it. And my bed is in storage somewhere. And we don't have an apartment waiting for us in Boston. And I miss my friends and family. I guess this is the hard part about flying by the seat of one's pants.