I had an adventuresome dream last night... occasionally I will have traveling dreams, and there is always a conflict. I either don't know how to drive, don't know how to get where I'm going, don't know how to drive the kind of road I'm on (sometimes the roads go straight up, sideways, down, upside down, under water, wave around, or just sort of end...), and there is always extreme difficulty in figuring out what to do. I had to go to Idaho, I think. But from Idaho I had to go to California. So I was driving, but I had to go to Platteville, Wisconsin first, and as usual in my driving dreams from Dubuque, the way to get to the bridge was even more complicated than it is in person (which is pretty complicated with all of the construction down town). I had to drive down steeper hills than what Dubuque already has (Dubuque has San Francisco-steep-hills), corkscrew-like roads that went over the edge of the Mississippi, and everyone traveled at super fast speeds so you had to be careful not to fall off the road and into the deep river below. I got to Wisconsin and the only way to explain the environment was that it was like I was on an alien planet. It was light, but the sky was dark dark blue, there were misshapen trees that almost resemble jungle-like/palm trees, and the road was very hilly and very steep. I could hardly see the road it was so steep and my vehicle had such a high profile.
Eventually, I was heading west and I think I was in Wyoming or Montana or Nevada or someplace. It was a flat, dry, hot desert, that's all that matters. We needed to get to the San Francisco area for some reason (I have a ton of family in north/central California, and I know they were involved in it somehow). Instead of driving, there was a more direct route that was far less expensive and meant I did not have to drive. This meant getting into a tube or a one-person kayak/boat thing and riding down a very long river called the Joliet River. This extended from wherever we were, straight down California and into the San Francisco bay. It sounded kind of fun, riding down a long river in a tube, except I had Oliver and Grace with me. Oliver's mode of transportation was a bike, and once we hit deep water, it started to sink. Oliver could not swim. Sally had just her suit, goggles, fins, and a kick board/swimming noodle for flotation (she's a competitive swimmer, so that's all she needed), and Sally had to keep going in and saving him before he drowned. Eventually he got some kind of scooter-like board that he could sit on and balance and it had a little automatic paddle in the back that made him go. Still, it was a long journey with my constant fear that Oliver, Grace or Sally would be sucked down the wrong tributary and get lost or drown and never be found again. Eventually we made it, after going through several man-made tunnels to cut through mountain ranges and passed several tubes that sat in roped off areas that were man-made and they filtered out/pushed out clean water for the travelers. The whole thing was kind of eerie, always made me anxious, and was a trip I was glad to be done with when we got to Sacramento (instead of San Francisco). We then had to head home, and I remember being relieved I did not have to go on the river again, but I did not know how I was getting home.
The end.
Side note... Joliet is the name of the street I lived on when we lived in Lubbock, Texas. Joliet Avenue. Joliet, like all of the other street names in my neighborhood, is a suburb of Chicago.
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