Left Friday afternoon and went over to St. Paul to meet up with Nate, Renee, Donna, Geshay and Amy and promptly departed for points east (IKEA Chicago) at 4:30pm. Weather and traffic were good and we drove rapidly towards Janesville Wisconsin, our sleep-over point. We stopped for victuals along the way and Nate and I got Subway and took it over to McDonald's so the others could get their Friday fish special. I felt bad for eating outside food... yeah, for about a second. There was this clown in the corner cozying up to Ronald.
'Round about 10:45pm we arrived in Janesville where we crammed six people into a hotel room. Renee sat on the bed and got booty cooties (as you know they don't wash the bedspreads as often as the sheets). Eeek.

Nate and Geshay slept on the floor in some sleeping bags so they could 'prepare for the Boundary Waters.' Yeah, that'll do it, boys. I thought I would but I didn't sleep all night as I was really hot (slight fever maybe?) and maybe I was just a little uncomfortable about sleeping in a room with five other people, which is crazy as I can usually sleep anywhere. Plus, someone was snoring most of the night and somebody else got up like 7 times to go the bathroom and the toilet was industrial strength and just as loud.
We got up early Saturday morning, at 6:30am for pete's sake, so some people could have an early morning hot-tub session and we could all take showers and get pretty and all that stuff. I stayed huddled under the blankets, ignoring them as long as I could. Hotel breakfast was adequate.
We drove the remaining hour-plus to IKEA and shopped militantly for three-plus hours. The girls were in charge and we met at our rendezvous points each hour on the hour to check status. We swept through the entire store in a very efficient manner that even scared me. Of course, the girls are IKEA professionals. Seriously. They've got it down pat. I checked out almost every one of the kitchen displays to get ideas for my future project. We had lunch in the store (tasty!) and then took our multiple carts of consumer goods and headed for the checkouts. Several large sums later we collectively emerged and though we were flagging in energy proceeded to the shipping department to send our big items home to the Twin Cities. We are a "local" shipping zone for the store which means you can ship 25 items for about $150.00. We had 23. Sweet! Although we still had plenty to fill up the vehicles.
Wouldn't you know it, it snowed while we were shopping and a call back home revealed a snow fall of about five inches. The drive back was very sketchy until about mid-Wisconsin as roads were icy and snow-covered. In one particular area we saw about 15 cars in the ditch in about a 6-mile stretch. Fresh incidents, too, as people were still in the cars in some cases. We had walkie-talkies along and suddenly Nate said, "Where are you guys?! We just saw three cars fly into the ditch right in front of us." I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw only a single vehicle behind me. Yikes. The roads were glare ice and traffic was stacking up in the east-bound lanes. We were intending to stop at the next exit and just wait for road conditions to clear up, but by the next exit, they pretty much had, so we kept going, slowly and soon were back on safer surfaces.
Many hours later, we finally arrived back home in Minnesota. The iPod full of music was handy to have in addition to the six-disc CD changer. Although a case with a few discs in it (brand new ones, too) seems to have disappeared somewhere along the way. The walkie-talkies were also nice. We were all tired, but all happy we had a safe trip and a fun time. Now we wait for a week or so for our big items to arrive and maybe, with some forgetfulness or distractions, we'll be super excited when they show up and not wonder how we got worked up into a buying frenzy and purchased yet another Billy bookcase.