Driving home in the middle of the night

If I have to drive in the middle of the night, I want the road to be like I-90 from Rockford, IL to Elgin, IL really, because construction started after that and I wanted my last toll back.  Now, while this is a toll road (which I usually try to avoid), it is lit up like a landing strip and there are no concerns about deer bounding out from the side, or stuff in the highway that you’re not going to see until too late.  It was smooth, wonderful, asphalt and the first toll road that I thought might actually be worth the price of admission.  But then I hit construction and it went to hell.  Also, I believe that Illinois must be importing their toll booth workers from New Jersey or something because while it is 1am when I’m driving through, you can at least answer my “hello” with some kind of response.  Even a grunt will suffice, but I think that they don’t want people to get the idea that Midwestern charm extends to the toll roads which are strictly a business proposition I guess.  While we were able to leave the game early once a five minute major had been called and Denver was able to run up the score unchecked, leaving St. Paul at 8pm EST to drive home to Mid Michigan does not fill one with confidence.  We kept passing places that I had thought about stopping at on the leisurely drive home that we were supposed to have when we lost to St. Cloud State, but everything was closed on Easter Sunday at 11pm at night shockingly enough.  Even the Culver’s that we first stopped at for dinner was closed for the whole day.  The upside was we had three drivers to share the burden, the downside was watching Oscar wake up multiple times when we stopped and not know how to act.  He would laugh and clap sometimes, point out and clap at trucks that we went past and other times give that blank stare that says, what the hell am I supposed to do at this hour?  Sleep? Eat? Play?  I vacillated between thinking that we were badass parents who didn’t let having a kid stop us from something we normally wouldn’t have thought twice about to thinking that we were bad parents who should probably be punished with a really bad sleep schedule for the next week by our toddler….the one really interesting thing in the whole trip home besides the fact that we made it alive and relatively intact, was the black bear that we saw as we crossed into Wisconsin.  I thought that there was a large dog pooping on the hill beside the road, but as we got closer, I realized that it was a jet black bear and he was starting to lumber up the hill when I mentioned him to Tara and John.  So, the answer to the age old question, is that a bear apparently shits on the side of the highway and not in the woods….

The last stop for gas before hitting Grand Rapids and you can see the time which John made sure to capture