Milwaukee Portion continues my Springfield/Chicago trip with Tim Karas.  The earlier posts about the trip are Springfield Part One, Springfield Part Two, Chicago Day One, Chicago Day Two, Brookfield Zoo and Chicago Day Three. 

This is the day I was dreading because it was my last day and the day I was heading home.  I checked out of the hotel and headed over to Tim’s apartment.  After breakfast we drove up to Milwaukee to have lunch with my brother.  Since Milwaukee is about 90 miles from Chicago, we didn’t have a lot of time before meeting Rick for lunch so we headed to the Milwaukee Art Museum.  The architecture of the building is itself art work.  The museum is one of the largest museums in the country.  Since we only had about 20 minutes, we took photos of the architecture and the shadows. 

We had lunch at Hooligan’s.  It was great seeing my brother and Tim had a front row seat to our relationship.  Rick and I have a very unique relationship, we are very sarcastic with each other.  It drives our parents nuts.

All to soon, we were heading back to Chicago.  Tim and I said goodbye and I headed on my way home around 3pm local time.  Not really looking forward to the long drive.  Nor surprisingly I hit heavy traffic leaving Chicago.  It took me over an hour to get out of the city. The drive went pretty smoothly after that until I hit Louisville and had to take a detour around the western part of the city.  I ended up stopping in Tennessee at Hampton Inn around 12:30 EDT. I didn’t set my alarm, deciding to let my body decide when to get up.

The next morning I was on the road a little after 8am.  I saw an exit for Great Smoky Mountains National Park so I decided to head there to get a stamp in my passport and maybe hike to a waterfall if it wasn’t too far.  After driving for 20 minutes and not seeing any more signs, I quickly brought it up on my phone GPS and was shocked to see that the entrance to the park was too far away so I turned around and headed back to Interstate 40.  I did stop by a roadside store and pick up some fudge before getting back on the interstate.

Drove into a thunderstorm in Columbia.  The weather cleared once I passed Columbia until I hit Conway. It was getting darker as I got closer to home and then as I passed the turn off to Highway 544, the skies opened up and torrential downpour.  Thanks for the welcome home Mother Nature.  It was a great trip but one I will not make again.  I will fly next time I take a vacation in Chicago.

My first day of my Western Civilization class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Professor Robert Porter had us go around the room and tell everyone our name, year, major, hometown and an interesting fact about ourselves.  Luckily he started with the other half of the room so I was able to think of what I was going to say. At first I thought I would bring up that I am an avid movie fan and at the time I owned over 250 movies but then I realized that it was not interesting enough especially after one guy got up and told the class that he was in New York City on September 11, 2001.  I could have told the class that I had gone to Yosemite National Park in 1997 and took 9.5 roles of film or that I attended the games at Oriole Park at Camden Yards on the two nights that Cal Ripken tied and broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak.

But I had a truly unique experience, one that probably no one in the class had ever experienced, especially considering most of the class were not even born at the time this happened.  I stood up, gave my name, year, major, hometown  and then "my family and I were evacuated out of Iran in 1978."  There were a few gasps around the room.

I remember bits and pieces of our time there. My mother kept a journal which she recently turned into a blog: http://americansiniran1978.com.  The United States really let Iran down in the late 70s and we are all paying for it now.  Most of what I remember is that we lived in a HUGE concrete house that had a pool in the front yard and our backyard was very narrow and concrete.  Iranians have so few trees so they keep the ones that they have so there was a tree in the middle of our street.  My bedroom was directly above the garage.  My parents kept us very sheltered from all the upheaval that was happening.  The above photo was taken the day we were evacuated out.

An interesting twist happened a few semesters later when I took another class with the same professor.  In the class were two Iranian girls (their parents were Iranian) but they had never been to Iran.