I slept in until nearly 9:00am, and it was glorious. I let Ally continue to sleep while I got some coffee going, took a shower, and finished the rough draft blog for Days 4 and 5.
For me writing has always been a series of steps. I work on the theme in my head, taking mental notes about whatI want to remember, and when I sit down at my laptop I just start typing. This is what I did prior to doing this step on a computer, I just used a pencil and paper. I get lots of run on sentences, and some of it doesn’t make sense, but the ideas are there. After the rough draft stage I wait at least day before I start editing and revising. With this step I add ideas or move them around, change the word order so that sentences flow better, and break up some of the run ons I’ve created. If Shar is with me, I read it out loud to her. If she isn’t, then I share the document with her via Google Docs. Riding the Rails with Ally has been the exception to that rule because of the lack of wifi and the fact that I’m using Mac’s Pages app to do the typing. Editing and revising can be a tedious, choppy process, so when I’m done I reread it straight though. I consider myself a decent writer, but I’m sure when I reread these stories sometime in the future I’ll still find many and multiple mistakes I will have wished others had not seen.
With several days worth of blog written and revised, I got Ally up around 10:20am. Most of the hotels have checkout at 11:00am, so forty minutes is enough for her to get a shower, pack, and be out the door. Both Shar and Ally can attest to the fact that I’m nearly OCD about leaving a hotel. I have to be the last one out the door, and I do a complete room check prior to leaving. This includes under the bed and inside chests of drawers that were probably never opened. I’ve left things in hotels before, and this routine has caught those missing items prior to leaving. Plus, it makes me feel less better, a completeness upon leaving a place I have stayed.
I google mapped our next destination, Hudson, MI, and was happy to see it was only 300 miles away. I told Ally we would stop for lunch after getting some miles under our belts, and we were off. We were on a secondary road when we crossed into Ohio for my fourth time this summer, Ally’s second. There was enough shoulder on the road, so we stopped and got a good picture of the plain welcome to Ohio sign. The passing landscape had be dominated by picturesque farms and fields of corn, though it could have been sorghum, but it didn’t take very long before we were on I-80 heading west. 
It continued to be a toll road, making it harder for me to decide where and what we were going to do about lunch. Before long the lovely 70 MPH section of the freeway disappeared and we entered miles upon miles of 50 MPH construction zone. They had two lanes of the freeway tore up and prepared for resurfacing, but the process seemed to have ended there. My tummy started to rumble, so we got off of the freeway at an exit that indicated a Panera was available. Ally and I play what is called the “No Game” when it comes to food stops, an idea orignating from Shar. In the “No Game” any of the participants can veto a choice put to the group. It can sometime take awhile for a decision to be reached depending on the group size. I hadn’t eaten at a Panera, so I didn’t veto the choice. I paid the toll of $3.75 and we started cruising down a secondary road towards Brecksville, OH. It’s probably close to a Coos Bay sized town and Siri led us to a shopping plaza containing the Panera.
I had a small bowl of tomato soup, an a steak and cheese panini. Ally had a small bowl of Mac and cheese and part of the roll that came with my soup. I was floored when I saw the total of $26, I quickly considered it overpriced due to ok quality and mediocre quantity. I walked away full, but disappointed, and have crossed Panera off my list of places I’ll be eating at anytime soon if ever.
We headed north off of I-80 and did a quick pitstop to soak our feet in Lake Erie. It was a cute park created by locals to give access to the lake. Every bit of the shoreline within sight was privatized.
All of the driving we had been doing was cause my two spots around my shoulder blades to feel like hot, twisting knives were being jabbed into me, so we stopped at a service plaza about an hour later to stretch. I walked around for 15 minutes or so, trying to loosen my painful shoulder blade muscles, then we got back on the road.
Hudson is a small country town, but I choose it for three reasons. The hotel was in Michigan, it was close to the Ohio border, an it had a McDonald’s for dinner. The hotel turned out to be another great, small town, mom and pop owned, place. They literally got up from a dinner table to check me into our rooms, and the key was already in the room waiting for us. The hotel was very picturesque, set on a grassy hilltop and surrounded by just the right number of trees. I took a walk, enjoying all the care that had been taking in decorating, and shook off the last driving. I relaxed the rest of the evening in front of the tv, because It wasn’t too hot or too cool. We left the windows open all night for a nice breeze anyway.
Day 7
I was up by 9:30am, took a shower, and had some coffee before getting Ally up at her regular 10:20am time. She took another shower, and we packing the car at 11:00am.
The cashier at McDonald’s the previous night had told me of a Starbucks in a town about 25 miles away, so I googled it. We zipped down the back country roads to Adrian, a Coos Bay sized town, and stopped to pick up breakfast and a Michigan mug. 
We were heading back towards I-80 when I decided I to skip the toll road for a bit. The constant construction hardly made the freeway faster, so instead I turned right onto an old friend, Highway 20, and headed west. We went through a couple small towns, then had an hour detour around a section of 20 that was under construction. I seem to remember Shar following some big rigs around the same construction weeks earlier.
At Angola, IN, we were back on 20 and heading west towards Elkhart. The city had a couple Starbucks locations, and I still needed an Indiana mug. We found one at the second Starbucks, and drove around the block to a Sheri’s clone to eat lunch. I had a fried catfish sandwich and coleslaw, and Ally had the chocolate lover’s crepe with Nutella and strawberries. Unfortunately she’s been spoiled by Salem’s French Press crepes and didn’t realize that not all crepes are equal. We put the leftovers into a box, happy to have some dinner for later.
I reluctantly go back on the freeway, and we zoomed through our last hour and a half of driving to our hotel, the Chicago South Loop. The hotel is located in a slightly dirty, slightly empty, neighborhood, and doesn’t have a pool. Parking is free though, and in a fenced lot. I like that the hotel is centrally located enough to make Uber rides less than $10 to just about anywhere in the city, and the hotel costing close to $100 less a night than anywhere else nearby clinched the decision to stay here. We got settled in our nice room. The fancy inside of the hotel doesn’t match the bleak and dirty outside, and then I grabbed my book to go check out the lounge. It wasn’t finished being built, so I google mapped a nearby market which was about three blocks away. When I got to the door I found it closed and a sign indicating the reason being illness. Disappointed, I walked back to the hotel to relax.
A White Sox game was just about to start, so I turned on the tv. I puttered around on my laptop, enjoyed some lemonade, and watched my second favorite team come back for a big win vs the Toronto Blue Jays . I took a tv break and washed out one of my quick dry shirts in the sink. For dinner I made a beef cup of soup with my awesome heating coil. I let it heat the water for five minutes, and found the the soup was too hot to eat for almost ten minutes. I made Ally try her crepes again, then finished them for her. While she played around on her laptop, I researched some of the local attractions I wanted us to visit, made a gameplan for the next day, and decided that 11:00pm was good enough to go to bed. Ally stayed up, and I heard her following my example by doing some laundry in the sink. I tossed and turned, but after putting some ear plugs in to mute the noise of the city, I fell right asleep. The L train is close enough that you can hear it, and we have a corner room so are getting noise from two directions.
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