Wisconsiny homecoming

I'm doing my travel posts out of order, paging back through my notes.

I came back from Chicago to Milwaukee on the train on Friday night. I'd been in Chicago for a week. It was fun and all, and I did get out and about to see some familiar sites and some new ones. But you know what? I was anxious to get back home. Chicago was cold, and the city streets can be a bit grey and bleak, and I had to deal with homeless people asking me for change on every single corner on every trip, again, which I used to have to do every day on my way to work but haven't had to deal with since, and you can't really see anything from within the canyons of the tall buildings. And the Governor was led away from his house in handcuffs on corruption charges, right in the middle of my stay there. So although it's a great city, there are also some not so great things about it.

On the train I got out my iPod and listened to my five-star list, and was once again overwhelmed with the wonder and majesty of music itself, which I'd been away from while away from my guitar and also my YouTube addiction. But here it all was back. I didn't have a guitar to play so I drew a diagram of the strings and labelled all the notes and tried to work out intervals and major and minor scales and that kind of thing. So that made me feel like I was back home again, with my toys, being my whole self. I believe this happened right about the time we crossed the border.

As the train got closer to my stop I noticed that the snow was deeper, and there was a lot more space between the buildings.

I got off the train and a nice girl helped me with my suitcase. She had seen me struggling to get it in the overhead rack when I boarded (I bought some things, and it had got pretty heavy), and then when I was getting it back down again she came up and helped me, and then when I was going to make my way down the narrow and icy stairs of the train to disembark she just took my bag from me altogether and set it down on the sidewalk at the bottom. "I need to go back to the gym," I said, embarassed, and she said, "I do this for a living, don't worry about it." So, the very nice lady baggage handler saved me from trouble, because my bag was heavier than it had been going down and I was in a weakened state because of my belly thing a few days before. Very neighborly and Wisconsiny.

I had to scrape the ice and snow off my car. It looked like it had been pretty warm that day and then froze up again - there was a sheet of ice a half-inch thick all over the car, and when I got some of it loose the rest just slid off in huge chunks. Like how peanut brittle breaks up. It took a while to get the ice off the front windshield, and I brushed snow off the top of the car as well. There was another guy doing the same thing a few cars over, to his SUV. Then I tried to pull out, but the car slid on the ice and wouldn't go. I got out three or four times, trying to look for the block (shovelled some snow to make a path for the back wheels), but it still just spun. I tried to put some grocery bags down behind the front wheels for traction (front-wheel drive car) but they just slid under and spit out the other side. I gave up and waved at the SUV guy just as he was readying to drive off - once he left I would be alone in the lot and Triple-A would be my only option. He didn't seem real experienced pushing stuck cars, but we worked on it together, he pushed from the front and I got loose. I thanked him profusely, and he said, "No problem, we're in Wisconsin." That's what it's like. I remain deeply grateful.

I drove around the corner to the first hotel I got to - a Super 8. Not five-star like the hotel in Chicago had been, more about one or two stars. But friendly, welcoming, and they had a room in the inn for me. The parking lot was glare ice, they must not have any salt, but I tread carefully and didn't slip or fall. The guy at the front desk was odd but very kind - a tall, lean young black man with his hair pushed up in a mohawk and a sleepy jazzy manner. When he was writing out my credit card receipt (no fancy electronic machines at the Super 8), the very loud Christmas music in the lobby changed and the opening of Let It Snow startled me. I asked him, in order to make conversation, "So, are you sick of the Christmas music yet?" And he said, thoughtfully, while still writing, "No, I like the Christmas music. Because it makes me happy."

Welcome home, Ellen. I love Wisconsin.