On The Auditory Road

I rode through to night past Tennessee and Kentucky to Illinois back to Chicago where I’d been offered a place to stay for a month in the Archer Ballroom where I’d stayed two months previously. I was pretty tired from everything that had happened and wanted somewhere more like home to rest my head.

After the first couple of days I met a wonderful girl named Emily near the Bean and we went for coffee. After coffee neither of us wanted to separate and I was invited back to her house where we spent the night watching The Big Lebowski and talking about my trip and how beautiful I thought she was.

From this time we were nigh-on inseparable and spent nearly all of our time together, this turned out to be the case for the last three weeks I was in Chicago. On the most part we just hung out like old friends and slowly became best friends and then lovers.

As a final treat Emily offered to drive me around Lake Michigan, go camping on the Upper Peninsula and quickly pop into Canada. It sounded perfect and so I agreed, the reality ended up being very different to what I had expected.

Everything started out fine driving through Wisconsin, going to charity shops and buying local cheeses and dried meat. Everything went wrong when we ended up having a huge argument about absolutely nothing and we both sulked all the way to the camping ground.

We begrudgingly built a fire together and put up the tent, both of which took far too long and it became dark well before completion. When we did, eventually, lie down in the tent together Emily begged me to hold her but I refused to unless she promised we could be together again, she decided this was a fine deal and we spent a freezing cold night together in the woods with Coyote’s howling in the background.

In the morning I woke up and took a walk along the beautiful sandy beach atop Lake Michigan and breathed in some of the freshest air I’ve ever experienced. After packing up Emily started us on our way to Canada, getting stopped 30 minutes down the road because she was driving 75 in a 55 zone and performing an illegal u-turn in front of a cop who then proceeded to confiscate her driving license; her only formal ID.

We did get into Canada eventually after much discussion between the two different border controls. It was just as cold and, as it was a Sunday nothing was open; we bought some Wendy’s hamburgers and drove back to Chicago.

We spent the last couple of days exclusively together and I was endlessly sad about leaving my new found love but extremely excited to be leaving the country. England was calling and only New York stood in its way.