Microstory 2263: A Long Road Trip

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In 2008, city planners from Kansas City, and those from Chicago came together with an idea. There were, of course, ways to travel between the two domains, but these pathways weren’t built specifically for this purpose. They twisted and turned to stop at other places, which was fine, but KC and Chicago enjoyed many special political and business relationships with each other, so they wanted something new. They began planning what would eventually come to be known as the Heartland Expressway, with a numbering designation of Interstate-56. It took sixteen years, but that highway is now officially complete, though people have been driving on sections of it for years. A couple of months ago, they held an event that was publicized as the Maiden Voyage of the Heartland Expressway. The current mayor of Kansas City, Missouri drove the roughly seven hours to Chicago with her whole family. Meanwhile, the mayor of Chicago did the same with his own family, stopping in the middle to have lunch with each other in a border town named River City, Illinois. It was a little funny, because the Chicago mayor’s family took too long to get going, and drove a little slower, so they were just a little bit late. His kids are younger, and you know how often they need to stop and get out during long road trips. Once they were finished with their meal, they went their separate ways, and ended up having dinner with each other’s deputy mayors. I’m sure you probably already heard about this, because it was a fun and innocuous story in the midst of all the bad news. It’s just relevant to today, because Kelly, Dutch and I just drove that route. It’s 428 miles from start to finish, which was perfect, because my EV gets about 450 miles to the charge. I wanted to test it out, and also just go somewhere. It was just a day trip, if you can believe it. We left at 5:00 in the morning, spent some time wandering around the city, particularly the pier, and waited for the car to charge up before leaving at around 14:00. We got home fairly late last night, and we were pretty tired, but we’re millionaires, so we didn’t have to worry about going into work today.