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On Sunday we were finally ready to head home.  Checking the weather on Saturday, we noticed that Iowa was under a blizzard warning, so we looked for another way home.

Why we didn't drive back through Des Moines

Heading out of Chicago, we were on the lookout for a gas station, as we had pulled into the hotel on Thursday with a little less than an eighth of a tank.  20 miles south of Chicago, we were still looking.  We picked an exit which advertised lodging, so I thought for sure they’d have a gas station.  No dice, so we had to stop at the local market and ask for directions.  Turns out all three gas stations in this little suburb (Willowbrook, IL) were at the next exit.

But, the weather was improving as we drove south, and this popped into view on our way out of Chicago:

Somewhere over the rainbow

We had planned to drive to St. Louis and then across Missouri to KC, but discovered that St. Louis was way out of the way, and we could cut across rural Illinois from Springfield to Columbia, MO, and pick up I-70 from there.  Having driven from St. Louis to KC a couple of times, the Springfield detour was preferable.

Brandon got a little cranky when we had to hop of I-72 onto a 2 lane state highway for roughly 90 minutes to get to Columbia (I still say it’s better than driving through St. Louis).  Lots of farm land, the occasional round barn or wind turbine, and not much else.

Crossing the state line

We crossed the Mississippi again, and Himu started asking if we were in Kansas yet, approximately every 10 minutes for 50 miles or so.  Geetha finally convinced him to try to take another nap. Norberto had no problem napping, since he’d been out all night Saturday networking.

The Big Muddy

We rolled into our driveway around 7:30, making the trip (with stops) in about 10 hours.  Geetha woke Himu with a question, “How far away is Lawrence?”

“2 hours,” he answered.

It was a long trip, but not as long as it would have been to get stuck in a Midwestern snowstorm.

Saturday was the big day, my poster session.  The organizers changed it up a little this year, requesting that presenters be at their posters for two thirty minute blocks – one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  With setup at 8 am, and sessions at 10:30 and 2:30, I had a little time to attend a few talks, about an hour for lunch a block away, and that was it.

Social stratification of height in post-famine Ireland (1860-1910)

My poster turned out really well. Apple’s Keynote (their version of Powerpoint), is much more intuitive to use and makes prettier charts.  PhDPosters.com had my poster printed and delivered to my door in 3 business days, for cheaper than it would have cost to print it locally.

Kristie with her poster: Finding the Scot in Scottish-American

My labmate Kristie had her poster session the same day.  For the afternoon session, she had to change her shoes, because her dress shoes were too uncomfortable to stand in.  Looks like she wasn’t the only one with yucky dress shoes, though.  This was the view from my poster at the afternoon session:

His shoes are hiding under the paper

Heh.  Those are socks.  You can just see the edge of his shoe peeking out from the paper.

I had several people stop by with questions, and I heard rumors of a hoard or two clustered around my poster when I wasn’t there.  After the last session, Kristie and I went upstairs to hear a couple of talks on genome research. One was by a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, discussing the status of the Neandertal Genome project – very cool. While the mapping is still in the preliminary stages, they are getting some interesting results.

Divergence estimate for Neandertals and Humans

Another was by the folks at 23andme, a personal genomics company, discussing how to use autosomal markers to trace ethnicity.

Plot of genetic distances between European populations - the blob off to the left are the Basques

Unfortunately, many of the talks I was most interested in were happening while I was scheduled to be at my poster.  It would be nice if organizers could schedule the genetics poster sessions at a different time than the genetics talks.

On Friday, one of my labmates had her poster session, so we took her son and braved the Chicago public transit system to visit the Field Museum, a place I had wanted to visit since seeing the dinosaur in O’Hare during our honeymoon.  Jeff and Kristie (another labmate) had been here all week, having made a family vacation out of the conference, and had figured out how to get around.  A couple blocks walk and a relatively short wait at the bus stop, and we were on our way.

The view from the bus stop

We arrived at the museum just in time for lunch.  They had a nice cafe with decent food (better than the McDs in the basement, anyway), so we stopped there first.  FYI, if you’re an instructor and have an ID saying so, you get into the Field Museum for free.

Outside the Field Museum

The highlight for me was getting to see Sue, the largest and most complete T-Rex ever discovered.

Sue

Impressive.  Most of what you see is actual fossil, except her head, which was too heavy to mount on the display.  They keep her head upstairs.

Sue's head

We also made it downstairs to check out the Egypt exhibit.  They have a nice collection of mummies and artifacts, including a boat that was part of a Pharoh’s burial:

Boat fit for a king

Himu had done a unit on Egypt at school, so he told Brandon all about ancient Egypt.

Mummy

Overall, it was a great way to spend an afternoon in Chicago. I wish we had been there a little longer, and could have gone to the aquarium and some of the other museums.

Inside the Field Museum

The national AAPA meetings are in Chicago this week, and I’m presenting a poster on Saturday.  We decided that to save a little money, we’d drive up.  Chicago isn’t that far away, and at the time, we expected to have Kaity with us.  Turns out the State finals for Science Olympiad are also this weekend, so Kaity is leaving for Wichita on Friday.  With plenty of extra room in our truck, a couple of my labmates decided to ride up with us, Norberto, Geetha, and her son, Himu, giving us almost a full truck and making the commute a little less tedious.  . We left Lawrence at 9:30 am, it was rainy and cold, but driveable. For the record, the first pit stop was not for the pregnant lady, but for the Costa Rican who had a little too much java this morning.

So much for April showers....

And what is it with freak April snowstorms, anyway?  It’s supposed to be SPRING, dammit!

Zoom zoom

By the time we got to northern Missouri around 11, it was snowing.  Big, fat, wet flakes, making visibility an issue and the drive white-knuckled for a little over an hour. My impression of Iowa, and we drove across most of the state, I think, is that it is cold, mostly wet (either snow or rain, depending on how far east we went), and every bit as windy as Kansas (which I didn’t think was possible).

Crossing the Mississippi

Himu slept most of the way, waking up for lunch somewhere around Des Moines, and then sleeping for another couple of hours after. He woke up as we crossed the Mississippi into Illinois, asking his mother how many more states we had to drive through, and when we were going to get Chicago.  I think he was beginning to suspect that we had made up this place called Chicago and he would be trapped in the truck forever.

Coming into downtown Chicago

The drive across Illinois wasn’t bad, at least the rain had stopped.  And then we hit the outskirts of the city.  I-88 is a toll road, and we had to stop to pay the toll four times.  The closer we got to downtown, the heavier traffic became, even though we should have missed “rush hour.”  We finally pulled up to our hotel a little after 7pm (about a 9.5 hour drive, thanks to poor weather conditions, various pit stops, and traffic issues), and after confirming with the porter that we were indeed at the right hotel, we gratefully handed over the keys to the truck for the valet to park, unloaded all the luggage, and made our way to our rooms.

We aren’t planning to drive again until we leave on Sunday. I just hope they can direct us to a gas station, or we’ll never make it out of Chicago.