Sadly, however, it was a bit of a tale of travel woe, so we don’t have our usual fun pictures of Zombies having fun in a socially meaningful public way for you.

In truth, we never actually hooked up with The March, though we did see a few straggler Zombies coming back from it; basically the pure, concentrated evil that is travel to or from the city of Chicago caught up with your humble Zombie Rights campaigners and taught us a valuable lesson: never, ever again shall the ZRC attempt to travel to downtown Chicago by car.

You know the stereotypes about driving in major cities, and many have their own claims to fame for being hostile and unpleasant. However I truly believe Chicago is underrated in this regard. We had, by GPS calculations, a roughly 2 hour and 20 minute drive to make, and indeed, it took about that long to travel *back* from the accursed Windy city. On the other hand, it took us over 4 1/2 hours to get from Madison to having disembarked our vehicle into Millennium Park.

First, there is the construction between Madison and Chicago, whose methods and purpose are seemingly the fruit of madness itself. There are several long stretches of work zone between the two cities, one 17 miles long, where one lane of the road has been torn up and apparently nothing is being done. On our Thursday trip to Slices we saw precisely one small crew laying tar all the way from Madison to Chicago. On the way back both times we saw some work being done at night by perhaps a half dozen people over literally dozens of miles of torn up road. Why, I ask myself. Why tear up many miles of road long before anything is to be done with it? At the rate we’ve seen work being done this ‘road resurfacing’ will take about 10 years to complete.

That, however, having been encountered on the day we went to Schaumburg for the Slices protest, I was prepared for. What I wasn’t prepared for was ‘how much Chicago sucks’, in the words of the art director. It took us 90 minutes to travel the last 9 miles into the city. We were nearly rear-ended innumerable times, cut off even more so, and generally the trip was a slow descent into hell itself.

Once we got downtown we discovered that the same road work and helter-skelter closed on/off ramps in Downtown Chicago from LAST YEAR’S trip to the Zombie March.. are still there! No progress being made whatsoever. Astonishing.

So we had to take extensive detours around the crumbling roadwork of the city to find the Park. Once we’d done *that* we discovered that every intersection was staffed by traffic cops trying in vain to manage the flow of cars, as the Zombie March was the same day as the Chicago Blues Festival. It would have been faster to travel by pogo stick.

Yet again we persevered, and somehow got to the city garage under the park where, of course, we paid 25 dollars to park our car in a labyrinthine, confusing network of underground garages where you expect to meet Theseus at any moment, but instead have to settle for foul odors and dankness.

We got to an elevator and got inside, only to have it repeatedly shudder and fail to work properly or move from between floors on our short trip to the surface; we seriously had to ponder spending the day trapped inside. Eventually it failed to reach our floor but groaned to a stop at another, and we got out in a hurry.

By this point we were now very late, but we wandered the park in vain for a couple hours, trying to catch the tail end of the March. Part of this is unfortunately my fault; the route and starting point for the march were clarified after I had put the details down in our travel itinerary and I never updated them. Apparently there is/was a whole route on the website and such posted.. yeah. So we were stumbling blind instead, having arrived so late. (I have to say, by the way, the route looks brilliant, having been planned to hit several news organizations buildings downtown to increase exposure)

In addition to all THAT, my camera battery suddenly failed, so even had we found the Zombies, we would not have been able to document the event. It’s an actual Canon battery too, recently charged. Not sure what’s up with that one.

We never managed to hook up with the march and after a couple hours walking around were tired and cold, so the ZRC had to call it a day. We left, dejected and thoroughly defeated, and went homeward. I have, however, learned a number of valuable lessons from this debacle.

1) I will never, ever attempt to drive to downtown Chicago again. Ever. With future events I will park and take the train. Dear dark gods.

2) Chicago does not now have nor will it ever have a functional system of streets. The roads currently placed there are an elaborate joke of some sadistic kind, or perhaps sigils carved into the Earth itself to allow Satan easier escape from Hell.

3) We need to get smartphones *yesterday* to upgrade the ZRC’s media and communications capabilities, provide backup camera support, GPS and so forth, and I’m moving that up as a priority for us budgetarily. If we have to skip a convention in order to avoid being ever cut out of the loop without a lifeline like this again, so be it.

4) If we ever go to downtown Chicago again, we’re taking mass transit. Special thanks to our governor Scott Walker for blocking the construction of a high speed train route from Madison, through Milwaukee, to Chicago which would take us there reliably and comfortably in 2 hours so we’d never have to do this again. Oh, how I hate that Anti-Zombie man.

Overall this was the worst trip/outing we’ve ever had for the Zombie Rights Campaign. Bad luck with technology, the outright hostile Chicago transportation network and mistakes in planning combined to bring it to ruin. I apologize.

Deneen Melody tried to warn us, but I did not listen. Oh, if only I had.

Tags: Public Appearance

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, June 12th, 2011 at 6:28 pm and is filed under ZRC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.