A couple of weeks ago Sam asked me if I was interested in road tripping to Wisconsin with him and I was like “let me check my schedule” because, hey, I might be busy napping and reading and reading and napping.

Turns out that’s all I had scheduled last weekend so I went for it because you can do that in the car and if I’m being honest, that’s not really busy. Let’s road trip to Madison, WI bitches!! 15 hours of -_- Which was fun, I think. Road trips are full of looking forward out the windshield, looking out the side window, looking down at your phone, and repeating that every couple of minutes. Like things are going to change.

There’s not much scenery change when you’re staring at your phone while traveling up through Tulsa, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Cedar Rapids. Lots of empty fields and pretty much every major town looks the same – big box retailers, restaurants, and traffic. Never change, America. There’s some comfort in being able to run into Dick’s Sporting Goods in a generic shopping center in Des Moines (or anywhere) to buy some boots because you only brought one pair of shoes to Wisconsin.

Let’s back it up like 12 hours to when I left home. I woke up early after sleeping only four hours because pre-trip excitement is a thing and I can almost never sleep a lot before a trip. I get an 0430 wake up message from my travel companions and mosey on down to the car (prepacked the night before) and head out but I’m sneezing my ass off. All the way up to Tulsa I’m sneezing and when I get to their house, I pop some benadryl for sweet, sweet relief.

Only there’s no relief. Just drowsiness. So I’m dozing on and off and then we get to Des Moines where, still sneezing my ass off, I buy a neti pot. Not just any neti pot though. This one has a filter so you can use it with tap water and not catch naegleria fowleri and end up on that House episode where the dude was growing weed and they thought it was Legionnaire’s disease. So, $15 win.

So we end up at Arby’s for dinner and I’m thinking long and hard about using the neti pot in the parking lot because I’m a junkie and I need my fix. Instead, I take it inside the Arby’s bathroom and use the distilled water I bought along with the filter on the neti pot and go to town. No shame. For a split second I was concerned about someone walking in on me, with a neti pot in my nose, and water streaming out of my other nostril and I got over it. I think that was the briefest of glimpses into what it’s like to need a fix.

That’s actually the highlight of the trip headed up there.