Beginnings

Things are off to a moderately okay slightly not wonderful start. Pat and Danielle dropped us off at the bus stop in Minneapolis around 10:15 and our bus magically arrived on time. We were able to sit on the top level but on our way in we heard something about technical difficulties. While I'm trying to sleep and Matt is trying to try to sleep we arrive in Wisconsin only to find that the "difficulties" were in reference to there being no heat on the first floor and therefore the driver's windshield was icing over.

Great.

Luckily it didn't take too long to resolve, although when Matt asked the driver what was happening he simply said "I'm waiting for them to call me back, they are brainstorming some ideas of how to fix it."

Back on the road I fell asleep easily (albeit intermittently) but Matt continued to struggle with finding a comfortable position. We arrived in Chicago in complete darkness just before 6AM, which despite the previous delay, was earlier than expected.

After making our way into Union Station we had some trouble figuring out what train we needed to take because the ticket booths were closed, but we somehow ended up finding the subway station about 2 blocks away. Something to point out, we had left our coats at home and had to deal with the Chicago winter in sweatshirts--this is our own fault, but I continue to tell myself it will be beneficial to not have a whole suitcase of coats in India.

During our subway journey to O'Hare, which was drafty and jolty, some young African American man blew a kiss to Matt (which I will return to later). At one point there was a stop and the doors didn't open and then they got stuck open so we had to wait for the conductor to come and push a button that closed them. It has me worried that everything in our trip will continue to have "minor complications", but hopefully they will also continue to be resolved easily.

Back to that mysterious kiss, after we got off the subway the same man approached Matt and said "Damn, if you didn't have a girlfriend I would be all over you right now. We'd be eating breakfast together." I'm sure he was a very upstanding young gentleman and I think we both took it as a compliment.

We are all checked in and Matt is sprawled out on the floor trying to catch up on hours of lost sleep. I gave up after 5 minutes of shifting around on airport benches.

I must admit, I'm not looking forward to the entire day of travel that awaits us but we have signed away our normal, secure, warm, convenient lives for quite some time.