Day 2: Chicago, IL, to Fairfield, IA

Breakfast in Chicago ended up being a bit of an adventure. My brother Jarret is a proponent of Yelp.com for finding sweet, local-favorite places to eat. I decided to adopt this tactic and I found a great local breakfast joint named Tweet. Three miles later Sheri and I parked the Prius in a sketchy area of Chicago and quickly learned that we could not eat at Tweet on Tuesdays. Bummer. Additionally we realized that we had no idea which of the six "Fairfield, IA" GPS entries we should drive to. That prompted us to ask the GPS where we could buy an Atlas from. Ironic?



Borders was next to a Jamba Juice and BestBuy. One smoothie, one atlas, and one power converter later Sheri and I were back on the road. It turns out that "Fairfield (Jefferson), IA" would have been the right GPS location to pick. It also turns out that a Prius is incapable of powering my monster of a laptop. The smoothie, however, was delicious.

The drive from Chicago to Fairfield is about 6 hours. The most tedious part seemed to be getting out of Chicago. Then it was corn, soybeans, corn, and more corn and soybeans. Due to the recent weather some of the corn and soybeans are under water. Some are not. People are worried that the crops might suffer this year due to the excessive rain. Sheri and I were just happy to make it across the Mississippi before it washes out the interstate highway.



We didn't get any great photos of the flood damage, but I definitely saw a few dozen mobile homes either floating in the Mississippi river or almost completely submerged by it. This made me wonder why someone would park a mobile home by a river. It also made me wonder why someone wouldn't move a mobile home if water levels were rising.

I did manage to get one bizarre flood related photo. Notice the makeshift damn that is being built on the road. It was fairly massive (the photo doesn't do it justice). This sent us on a detour. It also seems to imply that Iowans really care about saving Subway restaurants.



There isn't much more to say about the day's trip. We successfully made it to Fairfeild and spent the rest of the day visiting Paul, Mary, Laura, and Anna. Here is a sweet picture of their home. It is really nice, but just wait until you hear about the planned upgrade. Fairfield, Iowa, is a hotspot for all that is related to Transcendental Meditation (TM for those in the know). You'll hear all about it tomorrow.