Big 10 Football Tour

So we were off on our first true roadtrip of the tour.  This time our glorious ride would change from a Pontiac Sunfire to a 1995 Chevy Lumina.  Of course, we tagged the car with our "just married" aka "high school cheerleader competition" car paint.

Making an already congested car even tighter, we added Adrienne Bryl to the mix.  Both Adrienne and Blake were trying to recover from a miserable illness, so Blake was a trooper for sitting in the back with the living dead.  He even took a photo of the scenery...

The Chicago Loop only cost us about an hour, but at "Wes Miles Per Hour (that's below the speed limit)," we didn't get into East Lansing until after 2 AM.  The Super 8 that Wes had booked for us didn't get the memo that it was the year 2009 as they were still using Carbon paper to book reservations and swipe credit cards.  The check-in process took a good 30 minutes.  The clerk at the front desk had an eye that someone had mistaken for a scratch-off lottery ticket and .


When we saw that our hotel room had practically nothing in it, Blake asked for another pillow and blanket.  When the clerk denied his request, Drew got angry.  The clerk claimed that the reservation only showed a single person.  We knew that the reservation had 4 on it because we had already yelled at Wes for costing us extra booking fees by actually telling the hotel how many were in our party.  Despite the fact that the Hotels.com print out clearly said 4 people, the clerk was adamant that the reservation was for a single person...at which point Drew yells, "Why the hell would a single person book 2 double beds?  We wouldn't be having this problem if you weren't still using a computer from the 1970's!"  At this point Drew calls hotels.com and tells them that the place is moldy, has holes in the wall, an incompetent staff, and flith everywhere.  Long story short, hotels.com can't help you.  To read more about it, check out the Hall of Shame.  At roughly 3:30, we finally got some sleep, but you can see some photos of the Palace below...

Our travels to and from East Lansing passed lots of fun places, including the town of Climax.  Another interesting town is Grand Rapids, but the economy must be getting really tough here.  Why is that?  Well, they can't even afford to spell out Grand Rapids; notice on the photo below it is "Gd Rapids."  It's especially odd as the town below it, Three Rivers, has the same number of letters and is spelled out in full?

There is also some interesting billboards along the way, including one for the Gizzard Farm and the creepy dentist ads shown below.  Dr. Keith West is not paying us for this ad, but we're paying him since its so rediculous!

You've got to take advantage of some of the Michigan truck stops on the way too!  At a Flying J, Drew picked up this great new sleeveless shirt for work and Blake found the guitar of his dreams.  Meanwhile Jeff found what everyone is looking for at a truck stop, a great new samurai set.

The last two hours of the roadtrip were extremely tough as the Chicago traffic was rough & Wes was going the speed shown on the odometer to the left in a 65 MPH zone.  He did however demostrate his ability to simultaneously eat Doritos while driving.