Champagne-Urbana (or Urbana-Champagne)

I took a small trip to the University of Illinois earlier in October.  This was my annual Big Ten trip (last year, as you may recall, I was to make my first visit to Nebraska but my flight was canceled due to a snow storm). 

I had been at U of Illinois before, but this time I found out the reason that the city calls itself Champagne-Urbana but the univerisity is said to be in Urbana-Champagne.  The university straddles the two cities which are separated by Wright Street, but the home of the university president is in Urbana, which gives it the precendence, apparently.

Anyway, it is a nice city, we had some nice meals, and it was a good trip.  Even the drive - which skirts Gary and I have made meny times, always in terror, surrounded by semi trucks -- was not as bad as it has been for me in the past.

Indianapolis

A short business trip to Indianapolis last week didn't glean me much in the way of new sights or travel experience. Long travel days were the standard - a shuttle bus to Detroit (2.25 hours), a flight to somewhere else than Indy (outbound, Chicago - inbound, BALTIMORE FOR GOODNESS SAKE!) - and then another flight to my destination. Travel time was more than 6 hours each way, which in good weather would have been a shorter drive than that. However, it is January, and Indiana had a major snowstorm which began shortly after I arrived. So I am glad ultimately I flew.

It was my first time flying Southwest - which had an incredibly cheap fare offer but partly explains why I ended up with such a peculiar routing. Apparently nothing goes direct. All the planes are on their way somewhere else... Detroit to Chicago went on to Kansas City. Chicago to Indianapolis was going on to Orlando (wish I could have also).

On the other hand, because Southwest doesn't have assigned seats, just boarding numbers, I could always get an aisle seat. Also, the planes were not full. Not one of the four. Which meant that practically no one had to sit in one of those cursed middle seats. They were all empty and that was great.

The only thing I actually got to view in downtown Indianapolis before the snow began was the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. It's impressive and kind of neat to look at.

Other than that, it was an uneventful trip. Most of the time I was in a meeting room in the hotel, in the workout room or the restaurant or in my own room. I saw very little.

Iowa City

A trip to University of Iowa for a Big Ten conference was a long road trip for me in 2003. Since there were four of us, driving a university van was cheaper than flying everyone to Iowa City, but it did take about eight hours.

We stayed on campus at the university hotel. Contrary to my expectations, Iowa was not flat. Along the Iowa river, the university campus was hilly and green (of course there have been major floods of the river, including one a couple years ago that severely impacted the university). Other than that, it was a typical college campus.

The best thing about visiting Iowa was that I got a chance to see a friend. T had been a graduate student in political science at Michigan State and a co-worker of mine when I worked in a bookstore in East Lansing. All these years later, he'd completed not only the Ph.D in political science but a J.D. as well, and now was a professor at U Iowa. He'd asked me to bring him some Spartan gear but told me when I got there that he wished he'd asked me to bring him some Vernors as well. (Vernors is made and sold in Michigan but apparently not in Iowa.)

I met T for dinner at a Chinese restaurant near campus and then T showed me his office. We had a great conversation. That was probably the best part of the trip.

On the way back, somehow I ended up being the driver through the Chicago-Gary stretch of Interstate 80 - not recommended. I've driven that stretch several times and I always hate it. It isn't only that the traffic is heavy, always - though it is. The worst thing is that there are so many semi tractor-trailers that I always feel claustrophobic. It's very stressful.

But all in all, a good trip. Road trips with work colleagues are always fun.

Kansas City

One of my first road trips as a naive twenty-something was a cross-state drive to Kansas City for the World Science Fiction Convention in 1976. I had the experience of hearing one of my favorite SF authors, Robert Heinlein, speak in person. Since I had discovered his novels in junior high, I was especially excited by the prospect.

With my partner and several friends, we also had delusions of grandeur in thinking we could launch our new SF magazine at the convention. That didn't work so well and had a lot to do with me categorizing myself as naive. We didn't know about fanzines until we got there and the business portion of the venture was a complete and utter failure. But I had a good time otherwise and it wasn't the last time I would go to a SF convention.

I met Spider Robinson there before he was well known - and he also became one of my favorite authors. But more about the experience was simply the challenges of the trip - long, late night driving across Indiana and Illinois, my first glimpse of the Mississippi River as we crossed into Missouri, and a short visit to the Kansas side of KC for dinner one night. We slept six in one room and it was chaotic, but we were all pretty much broke. It was sort of like summer camp without the evening campfire.

The only other memory I have of the trip was the unusual sight of traffic lights on poles at the streetcorners instead of being suspended from overhead lines in the middle of the intersections. Downtown KC was the first time I had seen this variation and it made for some tentative driving.