Traveling With Transit: Quad Cities to Chicago (and beyond!)

 So with all due respect to the Quad Cities International Airport (MLI), which is, as so many things in the Quad Cities are, a perfectly good if very small version of what it is--in this case, an airport--it has relatively few connections and most of them are through Chicago.

Chicago is less than 200 miles away, and although we have not yet received our long-discussed actual passenger service there, it is still often more efficient and much cheaper to fly out of the Chicago airports, ORD and MDW, rather than connecting from MLI.

However, this is very difficult if you don't have a car. The Metrolink route 20 on the Illinois side of the Quad Cities will run to MLI, so you can get to that without a car, but it's much more difficult to get to the Chicago airports that way--at least until that train shows up (someday...).

But difficult doesn't mean impossible. Here is my account of doing just that: a no-car trip from my home in Davenport to Chicago O'Hare.

1. Bike to the bus

In order to do this trip, you have to get starting pretty darn early: so early, in fact, that the Davenport Citibus is not yet running. That means that while the Citibus would have gotten me to the Ground Transportation Center in downtown Davenport from which I could take the bus to Chicago (see immediately below), I could not actually take it to do that. So I could try to call a taxi or an Uber or something, but that would be a car--and also, actually pretty annoying to arrange that early in the morning in Davenport as well. 

So I biked. The ebike made this much easier, especially knowing that I could make good time and not worry too much about cars not noticing my movements on the street (though I did take the Mississippi River Trail a bit, which made things even easier).

The nearest good bike racks to the Ground Transportation Center were actually at the Freighthouse Farmers' Market, so that's where I parked.

2. Bus to Chicago 

That very early bus goes from the Davenport Ground Transportation Center to the downtown Chicago bus station, courtesy of Burlington Trailways. 

It's not a bad ride, or a bad cost, but have I mentioned it's *really early*?

It wasn't too crowded for earliness reasons, and it delivered me nicely to downtown Chicago without incident.

3. Buses and trains in Chicago

I won't insult your intelligence by making a big deal about how one gets from downtown Chicago to the airport, but suffice to say that the CTA has a few ideas. 

In my case, that meant a bus

to a train

which, with a couple stops for one of my favorite Chicago delicacies, and to see a friend, dropped me off at the airport station shown above: Chicago O'Hare.

But that's not quite the last piece of transit involved.

4. People? Moved.

To get to the actual international flight I was taking, I had to take one more step: the internal O'Hare people mover.

And that, plus a very long plane flight, is how I got from Davenport to (in this case) Europe without a car. An experience I would gladly repeat, although I'd much rather do it with a train instead of the bus...