" "It may be a few blocks away, but getting from one place to another thats only a mile away could take anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour. It just depends on which route you have to take and how many other thousands of people also are on that road at the same time."

Good grief! If your destination is several blocks away, you WALK. That's part of what makes city life attractive to people -- they don't have to drive everywhere. (They also ride on buses and subways and trolleys, or haven't you heard?) "

" Interestingly enough...I often have to make the drive from Charleston to Mattoon. Used to be 15 minutes...now sometimes it is 15 minutes just to get from the intersection of 130 & 16 to the Worthington Inn. And I'm not even talking about during lunch hour! What's with that? I think the stop lights along Route 16 are set for way too short of time. Often we are sitting there and no traffic is coming onto Route 16 from the side streets, so we stopped WHY? "

" i dunno what you're talking about equilizer. i drive from charleston to mattoon and back twice a day...and i can do it in 10 minutes :) "

" 10 minutes and 20 bucks for gas!lol "

" hardly, injustice85. it's one of the perks of driving a little 4 cylinder instead of a gas guzzler. in town (or driving the charleston-mattoon corridor) i average 23-26mpg. interstate's even better :) "

" Hey PJ, are you driving from near the high school? Because it is very rare to get to the Worthington Inn in less than ten minutes if you are coming from the intersection of 130 and Route 16.

Sometimes it does take 15 minutes, specially if ALL the lights are red as you get to them. And often there are cars backed up at all the lights, so when they turn green, all the cars do not get to go, some need to wait through a second red light, that just ain't right.

When you say you drive from Charleston to Mattoon every day and can do it in 10 minutes, are you just counting from the city limits of Charleston to the city limits of Mattoon? Just getting to the hospital or airport takes that long from Charleston city limits, so how fast are you driving, or are you flying your jet? LOL! "

" We are Yankee Transplants in Northern Mississippi - we live in a Suburb of Memphis on the Mississippi side. One of the things I miss the most of living in East Central Illinois (I grew up in Arthur & my husband in Stewardson) is the slow pace of things. Down here it does not matter what time of the day or night I can not go 1/4 of a mile and not see at least 1 other car. I get up and go the gym at 5am most mornings and I even see a lot of traffic at that early hour! When I was up there over Memorial Day weekend I was able to drive from Arcola to Charleston on the back roads and maybe saw 2 or 3 other cars. I guess we have to take the good with the bad! The other thing is people in large cities drive like idiots! Unfortunately, I think they have began to rub off on my husband and I! I have to re-think my driving when I am back up North. Down here the light turns yellow you gun it or you will likely be rear-ended! "

" equilizer...i usually pop onto lincoln at the little access road across from dog-n-suds and the stoping point is the mall...although i turn at wendy's and go down that lil road...as for the what the spedometer says...i plead the fifth :) "

" As someone who was born in Aurora and lived 28 years in the suburbs surrounding it I find myself an expert on this subject..

To "Read all over"..you obviously are getting the City of Chicago confused with the suburbs. It's an honest mistake, that many people from around here make but for people from up north they are two vastly different things. In the suburbs there are no trolleys, buses or subways. There are just roads like there are here and most of them have no sidewalks (the major ones anyway) and have cars flying past at 55 MPH. So walking really isn't an option unless it's right out your back door, or unless you have a death wish.

But in regards to this column...I agree. I have only lived here a few short years and even now when I go up north to visit family and friends I can feel my anxiety level increasing the closer that I get. People move much faster and have a little less patience. But I used to be one of those people, so I get it. When you sit in traffic all the time, you get irritable. When your grocery lines are always long, when the cashiers are always rude, when common courtesy has gone out the window....you get irritable. You do just want to get home and relax and get away from it all. At least for a few hours before you have to get up and do it all over again.

I made a bold move. I left many friends and all my family to bring my daughter to a place I thought would be better for her.

And every time I talk to one of my family/friends from up north (which is every day about) and they're talking about all the things they have to do, all the places they have to go, all the traffic, etc, I just smile and realize that I did the right thing. "

" Hello, caringmom, and may I wish you a belated welcome to almost Eden.

A few years back I had to attend a conference in the Chicago area. I drove up the night before to get a motel room and a night's rest beforehand. I didn't get much rest. The sounds of the traffic and human activity kept me up most of the night. The next morning I asked for directions to the center. I was told to take the next on-ramp and to get immediately over to the left because my exit would be to the left and would come up fast. I got to the end of the on-ramp only to find five lanes of fully loaded traffic bearing down on me. To this day I don't know how I made it over, but I did.

We have our share of idiot drivers around here. They pass me like bats out of hell, sometimes dangerously, only to end up sitting next to me at the same traffic light. I sometimes get the urge to ask them what they planned on doing with the extra fifteen seconds that they gained, then point out that they just spent them waiting fifteen seconds longer at the traffic light than I did. Hitting a red light can be annoying, but if you would check it with your watch, you will find that the wait isn't as long as you think it is. Forty-five seconds to a minute is not much time to spend being safe. If one minute means the difference between being on time or late, maybe you should re-evaluate the time you left home to begin with.

With my job I often find myself driving one or more hours to get to where I am supposed to be. My oldest neice, who grew up in a city, has the same drive time. I had to laugh when I learned that she covered only half the distance that I drive. My brother (her father) doesn't understand why we continue to stay around here when a city offers so much. I don't understand how they have managed to live where they are for so many years. To each his own. Everybody is happy with what they have.

There are times when I envy them their location. We don't exactly have an overabundance of nicer resturaunts, and I find myself using the internet more often to find what I need when I can't seem to locate it around here. But when I am driving, nature unfolds around me and I can enjoy the changing of the seasons. The truth is that I love living somewhere where I know that I have entered another town, because I drove through the country to get there.

When I was much younger, we went to Hammond, Indiana to visit a cousin who had married a city boy. We were in their car enroute to a get-together when we entered an area where the houses had about ten feet of space between them. Cousin Andy turned to me and said "Now we are in the boonies." I just looked right back and said "Andy, come to my house. I'll show you boonies." "