Road Trip V: Home Sweet HomeAbove: Here is a rest stop where I peed. It has no significance besides the fact that I peed there.

I had planned on finishing my babbling about my uber-fast trip to/from Dallas, but I am going to take a slight detour for a moment. I get home and see the news on TV for the first time since leaving. (We watched the Weather Channel while on the road but not the news. It was a great break from the incessant pounding of murder, war and crashing markets.) I was working on getting my wireless connection to work on the computer while "Pardon the Interruption" (ESPN) was playing softly in the background....when I hear that Herschel Walker, super famous football player, retired from the Cowboys, has Multiple Personality Disorder.Stop.

Right.

There.

Huh?

I swear I just heard Tony and Mike say Herschel has written a book and has announced he has been treated for Multiple Personality Disorder. I hopped immediately onto the web to get further information, as this is much bigger than anything I could write about my trip or about the merits of Opus Dei.

There it is, in black and white. It hurts my head. (I've included the actual link to the story so you can read the whole thing yourself.)

CLICK HERE FOR HERSCHEL STORY

Suffice it to say, the web site reports: "In the just-released book "Breaking Free", former NFL running back Herschel Walker delves into his excruciating struggles with dissociative identity disorder, saying he tried to manage a dozen alternate personalities and that the condition nearly drove him to suicide.After his retirement from football in 1997, Walker said the disorder began to overwhelm him. At one point, while sitting in his kitchen, he said he played Russian roulette with a loaded pistol....."DID, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, is described as a relatively rare mental condition where a person has two or more distinct personalities.....Jerry Mungadze (Herschel's therapist) says he met Walker's "alters," during their sessions."

"They will come out and say, I am so-and-so. I'm here to tell you Herschel is not doing too good, Mungadze said. " ... When he finishes, it would just disappear back in him, and Herschel comes out."

Oh dear. That gives me something to chew on now that I'm back home......and, here I was worried how I hadn't pooped since before the trip started.

But, back to me. After all, it's my blog and it's all about me. Our final day of travel was rather simple, as we were only five hours away from home. We hopped in the van, started driving and enjoyed the finally-nice-albeit-cold weather. Black Toes drove, I rode, we zipped along. It was very uneventful until the end...

....We were five minutes away from the end of the trip. Five lousy minutes. You know where this is going....GC Black Toes is zipping along the two lane highway, scenery blurring pleasantly by...when a State Trooper--coming toward us--whooshes by. Immediately, I can tell Black Toes is concerned. I'm confused, cuz to my knowledge, the guy didn't speed the entire trip and is a very excellent driver. I am convinced that there is nothing to worry about because I'm thinking that there is no way some State Trooper can radar us going one way as he's going the other. I reassure GCBT that my friend MJagger has told me that "they" don't do this (radar as driving) and thus we have nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, I misunderstood MJagger and sure enough that squad car made a quick U-turn and started after our van. I see the squad turn on his lights. Uh oh. I ask Black Toes if he was speeding, as I certainly didn't know about it. He, being the most honest man on the planet, indicates yes, he most certainly was speeding.

Five minutes away from the end of the trip and he's getting pulled over.

Suffice it to say that he got a speeding ticket. The Trooper was polite enough but the result was the same. I'm so sad I want to pee. (But, not poop. I wish I were pooping but there has nary been a poop since before the trip. I digress.) There is really nothing to say or do but drive the last five minutes, moving citation in hand.

Sigh.

So, we part our ways, our assignment of getting 84 year-old Alice in Wonderland to the land of Lily pad completed. It was a very wonderful endeavor but now the task is done and I must return home. A pee, a hug and I'm off.....
....to get caught in a giant ball of traffic hell. This is the view I had for over 30 minutes. Sitting. Staring. Sucking in diesel fumes. Laughing to myself.

This makes me laugh because we literally never got caught in traffic during the entire 2100 miles of the trip and here I am sitting in traffic not ten miles from home. So, it is going to be THIS kind of ending to our near-perfect trip.

Rat bastards!

And so, I leave you with a picture of a sure sign of summer in Illinois:
There's no place like home.