Start point for me : Pittsburgh, Thursday, around 11am. Start point for my parents and John (my sister's incredibly cool ex) : Five hours north-northeast.

  

The first batch of pictures : a wreck in PA, a Moose sighting on the Ohio turnpike, and one for xeno found on a trash can at one of the many identical rest stops on the Ohio stretch of the turnpike.

Through the course of the journey, it was discovered that intelligence is not a requirement for turnpike rest stop employees. It is, if anything, grounds for dismissal. I dealt with a total of four - one was a complete idiot, two were apparently recently lobotomized, and the fourth apparently had no idea he was wearing a work uniform, let alone working, let alone customer service. This wouldn't have surprised me in Indiana. Indiana is a hole. But this was in Ohio. The Ohio turnpike road is a bit crappier than Indiana's (the difference is really obvious right around the state line), but Ohio's rest stops are much, much nicer. Even if the employees aren't. The Ohio rest stops have things like huge plasma displays with weather reports and pollen count; stainless steel bathroom stalls that are actually clean and work, and look and feel reasonably modern. The Indiana rest stops, conversely, look like discarded Cold War relics with Hardee's signs stapled to them, featuring some of the nastiest public toilets I've seen (!) and country music on an ancient PA in place of Ohio's high tech constantly updated AV PSAs.

Indiana apparently elected to put its money into the road itself instead of the accommodations. The state makes up for it by being mercifully short - maybe a third of the Pittsburgh-to-Waukegan drive time, tops.

  
  
  

Ohio and Indiana are flat. Very, very flat. Flat enough to creep me out, flat enough to creep my mom out. The area the turnpike plows through is full of creepy crazyass power lines, cellular towers, radio towers and rotting agricultural and rail infrastructure. Eventually the environment evolves into an orgy of high tension lines and other forms of industrial nastiness as Indiana farmland gives way to pre-Chicago sprawl.

  
  

The Indiana turnpike dumps out onto the Chicago Skyway toll road/bridge - you hit it without so much as an off ramp or a turn. Chicago is the only city we pass through on the trip - the rest of them (Gary, Youngstown, Cleveland, Pittsburgh) are all well off the artery. As my camera can't cope with the idea of Urban Dark, I took a bunch of long exposure blur shots. A few of them turned out, and a couple of them actually look pretty cool. The Chicago skyline is gorgeous.

Things took a turn for the grumpy in the Windy City - the road degenerated into a morass of badly labeled construction routing, then passed on into an hour or so of unlit (!), BADLY labeled ( exit signs the size of my head way up on a pole on the right lane on a road the instructions say you're supposed to stay on the far lefthand side of) road that eventually delivered us to the End Point : Waukegan, Illinois. Home of Naval Station Great Lakes and most emphatically NOT Chicago. Waukegan is Chicago the same way Butler is Pittsburgh - everybody lumps it in because it's "nearby." Total drive time from Pittsburgh : About 12 hours. Total time-in-vehicle for the 'rents and John : About 17 hours.