The Adventure Begins… sort of:

After much hemming and hawing, I finally decided that what I refer to as the first day of the rest of my life would begin with my road trip on Saturday, June 9th. I would enjoy a leisurely drive to Cleveland, spend Sunday at the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame and maybe the Botanical Garden before departing for Indianapolis. On Monday, I would tour the famed Indy speedway and the Motor Museum/Hall of Fame. I had even drafted the first entry for this blog in my mind…When I think of all the exotic, distant and exciting places I could begin my travels, Cleveland does not come to mind…..
I packed up my car, cleaned my condo, drove my son downtown, gave him a big hug good-bye and drove off……Exactly two blocks, when one of my tires hit a curb, followed by an loud whooshing sound that could mean nothing good. I looked back, but didn’t see anything untoward and the car was driving okay. Until I got on the Gardiner expressway when the annoying computer that is my nemesis went “ding” and a message started flashing “check tire pressure soon.”
I crept gingerly to a tire store some miles away. The manager came out, looked at my tire, saw the very ugly two inch gash in the rear passenger tire and rather gratuitously said “that does not look good.” I agreed. “No problem” he said, “we can change it in half an hour. But best that you get both back tires replaced. For balance,” he explained. That sounded sensible to me so I didn’t even question the $1,000 price tag.
Except 20 minutes later he came back and said that he needed the special, unique-to –my-car factory key to unlock the tires and mine was missing. Did I know where it was? I had no idea what he was talking about, except I knew this was not going to be a quick, but expensive fix.
3 hours later, my car had been towed to the only Toronto dealership open on Saturday that did service, just to be told they didn’t have the right size tire in stock. They were able to use a master factory key to unlock my tire and put on the spare, but only after I promised not to drive over 80 kilometers an hour. My eminently reasonable suggestion that they let me borrow the master key, go back to the tire store, have the tire store change the tires and return the key, was flatly rejected. Making it to Cleveland on Saturday was not to be.
So I spent the first two days of my trip back at my condo, waiting for another dealership to open on Monday. Cleveland was scratched from the itinerary, as was Indianapolis. I am due in Texas on Wednesday for a scrapbooking convention and it is a 22 hour drive. No time for dillydallying or sightseeing on route.
Monday morning came, I went to the dealership. Turns out I needed 3 new tires; another one had a gash in it from some unknown incident and there was a bulge in a third tire. The only good news was that it was only going to cost $1,000 for all 3 new tires.
By 11:30 I was on the road. No hiccups. At 8:00PM, I turned off the interstate and found a room in a Comfort Inn. The room has air conditioning, a TV and the bathroom has been recently tiled. There’s a large church outside, lots of shopping malls and tons of firework stores around. Other than that, everything is very non-descript I had to use Google Maps to figure out where I was. Matteson, Illinois, just on the other side of the Indiana border, about 30 miles from Chicago. I grabbed some KFC, opened a bottle of wine and thus ended the first day of my trip. When I think of all the exotic, distant and exciting places I could begin my travels, Matteson, does not come to mind…..