Day 1: Larrington Towers - Franklin Park IL

 O hai!  Mr Larrington is once more on his way to that Battle Mountain, that they have now.  A casual glance at Thee Mappe¹ will shew that Chicago, to which Franklin Park is joined at the hip, is not very near Battle Mountain but that I am here is mostly the fault of Mr Adrian "Jelly" Johnson, a barman of no fixed mass.  Because one day many years ago I wandered into Imperial College's Southside Bar - aka "Stan's" - and he was playing this:

Now as best I can ascertain the song has bugger-all to do with the Corps of Discovery who explored the newly-purchased Louisiana in 1804-06 at the behest of President Jefferson, led by, well, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, but in the past twenty years I've kept crossing their path up the Mighty Missouri, across the Rockies and down the Fairly Mighty Snake and Very Mighty Columbia rivers to the Pacific so I thought it might be rofflesome to retrace some, or more, of their trip.  Back then "Louisiana" was not just Noo Awlins and the surrounding steaming swamps but comprised most of the current USAnia between the Mighty Mississippi and the Rockies and even extended into present-day Alberta, which explains why they were where they were.  So I bought a guide bok and sat down with it in one hand and Google Maps in another and very nearly started booking flights and cars and Stuffs and then the next day BRITAIN went into lockdown, because this was 2020  And also Battle Mountain didn't happen that year anyway.  Or the next, come to that.  And last year I wasn't convinced that I wouldn't get struck down by The Plague in the wilds of North Dakota, so I didn't do the trip then either.  But now...

Not wishing to find myself caught up in the horror that is the Pickled Lily line during the rush hour I decided to leave Larrington Towers Well Early.  Thereby arriving at Thiefrow about three and a half hours before the Shiny Plastic Birb² whisked me across the Stormy North Atlantic.  Now, being a gude little boy I had already done the online check-in business the previous day but no power on Earth would persuade American Airlines'³ webby SCIENCE to provide a boarding pass to my portable telephone, no.  Instead I had to print one.  And then Nice Airport Lady gave me another one at the bag drop anyway.

Eventually the Heathrow Machine deigned to tell us the departure gate.  Where we actually had to get on a bus to be taken to the Shiny Plastic Birb!  How quaint!  Shiny Plastic Birb only about 1/3 full, which probably helped explain how the driver was able to knock about 45 minutes off the scheduled flight time.  Lovely clear skies over southern England afforded a cracking view of the Severn Estuary, complete with bridges but Wales and Ireland were coughing under a blanket of cloud so I went to intermittent sleep until the birb woke me up with bouncy-bouncy over the Labrador Sea.

Now the clever buggers at Boeing have not fitted their latest widebody long-range twinjet with conventional pull-down blinds over the windows, no, instead there is a little button under the window which, when poked, changes the tint of said window by the miracle of SCIENCE.  With about 75% tint it renders the outside world sort-of monochrome, which means that the numerous lakes of Labrador ended up looking like puddles of mercury spilled onto a dark cloth.  NB: simile All My Own Work, armchair literary critics!  Sadly it clouded up again around the border with Québec and stayed pretty much that way until we started descending over the middle of Lake Michigan.

I thought they had Passport-Reading Daleks at O'Hare Airport but it seems either I was mistaken or they've been exterminated since 2016 when I was last here.  Queueueueue for immigration about 45 minutes i.e. about half what Russell Bridge, Barney Townsend and I suffered in San Francisco last year.  And once summoned into the presence of the Wielder of the Stamp it took about a minute.  Grabbed my already-off-the-magic-roundabout The Luggage and piled onto thei little clockwork train to the rental car place.  To Mr Enterprise's bit thereof, specifically.  Then had to march all the way back to the clockwork train station and the same distance again in the opposite direction when I discovered that my reservation was actually with Mr Thrifty.  Queueueue for picking up car about 30 minutes i.e. about a third of what I suffered in San Francisco last year and Lo! there was a shiny red Mustang convertible waiting by the time I'd trudged to the car park.

Spent quite a while driving aimlessly along the road outside the airport while TwatNav v2.0 attempted to find some satellites, before finally getting to my resting place.  It has been Stupid Hot in these parts of late but tomorrow is supposed to be just Ordinary Hot which will be a relief.

Finally, you may recall that 2D Thomas fell in a puddle in Sonora CA ont way back home last year, and subsequently contracted leprosy.  Fear not, o my droogies, for there is a New! IMPROVED!! lightweight racing 2D Thomas for 2023.  Here is the lazy git bagsying the bed that isn't buried under Teetering Piles of Crap:

I am still getting used to this new-to-me laptop so any typos are undoubtedly caused by that and not by me being a div...

1. Not included.
2. Being 787.  Includes much composite material in its construction.
3. Booked via BA but flight operated by AA.