Bloomington

There's an old riddle that concerns a goat, a cabbage, a wolf, and a man and a canoe that need to cross the river with all three. It's a logistics problem which kept running through my mind as we tried to figure out how we were going to do this move with Taylor. There were four things that needed to get to Bloomington- Taylor, Brittany, the U-haul truck, and Taylor's car. Taylor can't drive due to his ankle injury. Suki, my cat, is on medication that has to be given twice a day. There are two other potential drivers and one extra car. Saori can't afford to be away from St.Louis that long as she's leaving for Buenos Aires in five days.

So we compromised. I was originally planning to spend at least the night and maybe an extra day before coming back, but what we ended up doing was striking out for Bloomington before 8am, planning to unload and drive back that night. I drove the U-haul out with Tay as the navigator, Brittany took Tay's car, and Saori drove the Prius. It was really not that long of a trip, a little over four hours. From St.Louis to Terra Haute is a pretty easy straight shot along the major interstate, except of course, for those miles of gridlock traffic where they restrict the road to one lane. In the meantime, Tay makes a half dozen phone calls from the shotgun seat coordinating the movers, the apartment, and his renter's insurance.

From Terra Haute, we leave the main road and join a two lane road- the scenic route to Bloomington. It's much hillier than St.Louis, with much denser and taller trees. It's quite beautiful actually, and so I really didn't mind the 50 miles of corn fields, meadows, forests, and small midwestern towns advertising the oldest continuous picnics in Indiana.

I was not impressed with Bloomington at first sight. It's like an incredibly dense suburb- many streets are one way, parking is restricted everywhere, in a sense, the quintessential college town. Gridlock traffic getting into town, bad traffic everywhere around town. Pretty though.

Tay's apartment building is a real dump from the outside. The inside, however, is older and nicer- two generous wooden stairs. Wood floors. The main dissapointment was that despite the apartment company's insistance on needing five days to clean and paint the apartment, the apartment was minimally cleaned and no painting had been done whatsoever. The paint in the bedroom was literally cracking and peeling off the walls. So Tay talked to the landlord or the representative and after many discussions, got them to come back the next day to do a decent job of mudding, sanding, and painting.

Tay lined up two movers to unload the truck, which considering that we were three flights up and one man short, was a genius move. Two professional movers, two hours, $100. They emptied that truck in about an hour.

In the meanwhile, I took Tay around to run some errands- to the bank to pay the movers, to the Target; smashed into a sad little mall imaginatively named "College Mall" for a bike lock, and finally to grab some burgers for lunch.

Brittany and Saori started unpacking Tay into the kitchen, and then it was about time for Saori and I to take off. We said our goodbyes to everyone and hit the dusty trail. Really pretty in the early evening hours, and of course we got stuck again in gridlock, when an 18-wheeler had some kind of accident and limped along a one-lane road for about a mile or so, while we cruised along at 3 miles an hour, enjoying the chorus of twilight bugs. Stopped for a bite in Effingham ("Home of the Effing good time") and finally got back to St.Louis around 11pm. Hard to believe we were in three states, crossed a time zone, and returned in the same day.