10.1 Detour - Every County Road in Western Illinois

Bestest Friend and I are in the middle of a blog project. Each day of the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a little something about it. The theme for the first day of each month is "Detour."
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If you're driving to my home from Michigan, you essentially stay on I-94 until you get off at the Kenosha, Wisconsin exit.  Those are the directions.  You might need a bit of help getting to I-94, but once you're on the road, you just fucking stay on it.

Unless you clearly aren't paying attention and you somehow end up on I-290 somewhere outside of Chicago and when you frantically pull over at a gas station to figure out where in the hell you are, you realize that the best course of action is to abort, take the next exit, and let your GPS take you through local roads to get to your home.

And then you realize, after about the zillionth county road, that your GPS has somehow turned itself off and will not turn back on.  Never fear!  I have a paper atlas (my dad gave it to me - it's over a decade old at this point, but I can't give it up) and I used it to plot my way home. 

Except then you realize that you have no sense of direction and county roads don't have directions labelled on them.  I went into the gas station and asked the clerk which way was north.  To my surprise, the clerk just pointed and kept talking on the phone as if some lunatic living in another century hadn't just asked a convenience store clerk for directions.

So, I made it home.  But it's possible I saw every gas station in western Illinois.

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To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit to Quit.