A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Ikea

Last week I visited with my daughter Lauren in Chicago. She is moving and wanted to get a few items for her new apartment. It seems that Ikea is the place to shop these days and it was only 24 miles away from her apartment. This seemed doable so we printed out a map with directions and reserved a car for the next day.

We awoke Sunday morning to 6 inches of fresh slushy but beautiful snow! This weather event wasn't going to change our plans so we set out, without boots, to walk 7 very long blocks to the car rental. By the time we got there we could have wrung out our sneakers they were so wet.

We started the day early enough that we would beat the 'crowd', because everyone knows that Ikea on a Sunday afternoon is only for crazy people.

It was 10:30AM , by my calculations we should be there at 11:00AM...... WRONG!!!!! Well do you want to take a guess how long it took? Try 4 hours!!!!!

Unfortunately my daughter has inherited my sense of direction. It was definitely a case of the blind leading the blind. How could this be possible we only had to drive 24 miles!!!!

We had to resort to calling my husband to give us directions which isn't good because he has no patience with people that can't read maps even if they are his wife and daughter. We only had to call him 4 times..... It would have been more but my cell phone battery went dead. Bad sense of direction or not we did know we were going the wrong way when we saw the Wisconsin state line. By this time we were laughing so hysterically we decided to stop and have lunch and regain our composure.

Refreshed, we started out again and I really lost count on how many of the same toll booths that we went through twice maybe even three times. but our spirits were high and our intention was to get there, no matter what. We finally had Ikea in our sites from the highway, there was one last toll to pay and it was one of those coin baskets without an attendant. Guess who only had 38 cents left and the toll was $1.00.... we threw the change we had in the basket and drove off!

We arrived just in time for all the babies that completely had enough shopping along with their equally tired parents and those giant shopping carts that don't fit in the aisles..... It was total chaos, but Lauren and I were two very determined women on a mission so we prodded on.

Lauren did come back with some really cute items for her apartment and you will be happy to know that we made the trip back to Chicago in 25 minutes. I still don't know where we went wrong on the first part of our trip.
The way I chose to look at our adventure, if we wouldn't have gotten lost look at all the places we would have missed seeing!

My motto; Make the best of every situation

Stay pawsitive,
Audie
Kids and Pets community