Trip to chicago, PT Cruiser & PVD

Friday morning I come in to work as usual. Around 10am check my gmail & I got an email about Paul Van Dyke playing at the Vision club in Chicago. By then I'm going nuts. This is my one chance to see him live. I call up Andrei & break the news. He's pretty excited & he's like lets do it.

So, we rent a car. I wish if we had gotten something better than a PT Cruiser. Me and Andrei, we both agreed, that car sucks. The gas mileage is bad, really bad. The seats are very uncomfortable, and the response is really bad. I would hit the gas expecting a quick pickup, but it would take ages for the car to pick up some speed.

Around 12.30am that night we leave Lawrence for Chicago. Andrei was so excited he throws my direction away & just starts driving. After driving for an hour, in MO we see a bunch of cops, firetrucks & ambulance in one exit. For no freaking reason, Andrei takes the exit. The firetruck are blocking the other way so now we can't even get back on the highway except to turn around. It turned out a FedEx truck was on fire on that exit. I had a feeling that Andrei doesn't have a clue on how to get to Chicago. So, I made him pull over at the Sheraton hotel, went inside & got directions from the desk clerk.

We arrive in Chicago around 9.30am on Saturday. Andrei suppose to have a hotel reserved, but he didn't do it & he didn't tell me about it either. I got really pissed this time. So, I suggested we check out the club, parking's in that area first. After checking those out, we had a huge launch. After the launch Andrei is tired. But remember I'm pissed?! So, we drove around from one place to another, went to the Public Library for next two hours trying to find a cheaper hotel & he's ass was getting more & more tired.

Anyway, we checked into Carlton Hotel. We both slept for 3 hours. Around 5pm, we went out to do some site seeing. We check out few areas around downtown. Come back to the hotel, take another quick nap & then get ready for the party. We went to the Vision club around 10pm. All I can say is it was simply awesome. That's all I can say. We got home around 6am in the morning.

We checked out around 1pm on Sunday, visit the Field Museum, then head back to Lawrence, Ks. The Field Museum is absolutely a great place. It's a 3 story building. We got there around 2pm & they closed at 5pm since it was Sunday. We only had the chance to see half of the 1st floor only. I definitely plan on going back to that museum again sometime.

This time, I had the hotel print out the direction back to Ks. I drove for the most part, except Andrei took over from KC to Lawrence. I would've drove that too, except remember what I said about the PT Cruiser sits. My back was hurting, going numb.



The gas price in Chicago was outrageous. The whole time we were there, we never filled up our tank all the way. Still we paid $3.65 per gallon. Nuts.