It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.
I got to cover a South Dakota State football game last Saturday. It is always a blast to work with the Jackrabbits radio guys. (Best)
I had to drive through Chicago twice to get to Evanston and Northwestern to cover said game and then get home. (Worst)
High-speed jam-packed insanity is the rule of the road from south to north in the Windy City.
It was a Saturday late-morning/early afternoon drive north. You just know there is no happy ending there.
There was construction on the Bishop Ford, a small accident on the Dan Ryan, and that was just getting to downtown. The four-hour drive to campus was about five. Downtown was jammed, bumper-to-bumper, but that is just an average any day in Chicago.
The drive home took exactly an hour less, and considering that I got home about 4 a.m., that was a nicer ending to the day.
What is insane about driving in Chicago is that there are those incredibly crazy drivers who think 90 mph zooming in and out of six lanes of traffic is just okay.
And Chicago drivers all seem to think that driving very fast to the next jammed up spot makes things better. You weave in and out of fast-moving traffic, and then slam the brakes on and sit a spell.
On a week day, the traffic into downtown has eased up a bit after morning rush hour. You can sometimes get where you want to go with less stress.
Not on Saturday. Everyone is headed to downtown for one of the million activities in the late morning and early afternoon, and they don’t always know where they are going or supposed to be going.
The 90 mile-an-hour folks are just out for the thrills, and the rest of us are just hoping we get there in one piece.
Things were normal at Northwestern. They were not going to have a huge crowd for the game, and they don’t open the new stadium until early October (although I got a short tour and it is an incredible facility). The always congested Evanston streets were not overwhelmed, and since they were practicing for the big crowds, there were a lot of extra folks standing around the parking lots and garages.
None of them could direct me to the correct place, and none of them spoke the same language as me, but that’s another thing.
The Jacks gave the Wildcats a very good game. There were too many field goals kicked and not enough extra points after touchdowns kicked by the Rabbits, and they lost the game.
The drive home had all the busy-ness that Saturday night in downtown Chicago always has, but there was a little less traffic. The accident had been cleared and the construction zone was not backed up too much.
The 90 mph lunatics were still going strong, and they gave a couple folks too close to me a real scare a couple times. Once I got toI-65, I knew I had a chance to get home in one piece.
So I got wired up for big-city travel with a trip to Chicago.
I head to Philly today for Week 1 of the NFL season. We have the second game on Sunday, with the Commanders and the Eagles playing.
The nice part is that I can Uber in to downtown and the hotel on Saturday, and let security get us to the stadium on Sunday. I might have to return a rental car on Monday morning before my flight to Indy, but that’s a small price to pay.
Hoping that everyone has weathered through these last couple weeks. It will be cold soon enough.
Safe travels.
Jeff Nelson is a frequent contributor to the Journal Review and works professionally for Fox Sports working with the Indiana Pacers, Indianapolis Colts and many more professional teams.
