It's official. I know now why I could never live any further west or north of where we are currently. Our suburb borders the City of Chicago, so most of our streets follow the city's well-planned and reasonably well-executed grid. (Thank you, Daniel Burnham and your cohorts in the Plan of Chicago, even if not all your ideas were put into place.) Go a couple of suburbs out, however, and you'll find yourself in the land of sprawl.
I worked for a Los Angeles-based organization for about eight years, and while I appreciated their weather, I didn't appreciate how spread out everything was. You have to take the expressway everywhere, it seemed. And when you got off the expressway, you had to drive a mile between stoplights. And God forbid you miss your turn, because you'll have to drive another mile before you can even think of making a u-turn, legal or otherwise.
Evidently, the people who planned the greater Los Angeles area are now working for the suburbs of Chicago.
Today I had to drop off a form at our pediatrician's office. Rather than go into the north side Chicago office, where we usually go for appointments, I thought -- heh heh -- it would be faster to go to the north suburban location. Same amount of miles, yet ten times the frustration. It didn't help that the doctor's office had moved, and hadn't updated their information on their voicemail greeting to indicate the new office location, so I had to not only go to the old office in the middle of a random corporate park, take the toddler out of the car seat, go into the building, find the right suite, THEN see the sign on the door with the map to the new office. [Insert muttered cursing here.] Then I had to drive another ten minutes to get, I kid you not, less than a mile, because of the winding roads of this corporate park and the corporate park in which the new (albeit lovely) office is located.
If I'd just stuck to my usual route and gone to the Lincoln Park office, I'd have been there in 20 minutes, including the time it takes to park. It's not that I didn't know where the suburban office was, in fact I could have given driving directions to anyone else, even drawn them a tidy little map of the route. It was the sprawl, the damned suburban sprawl, that got me. Give me a grid, hell, even throw in an angled street now and then, any day. I don't care how small our house has to be in order to afford to live in our city-adjacent suburb. I am clearly a city-adjacent mouse.
