Day 2 – Across the heartland of America
Saturday morning dawned clear and bright. The noise and cacophony that greeted our arrival the night before was muted, as much by distance as anything else. I wandered into the Pilot Store for post cards, and picked up Arby’s breakfast sandwiches for us all. Hal was playing with some electrical component that has now slipped my memory, and blew out the light bulb on his testing probe. This was unbeknownst to him, until he touched the probe to a hot wire, assuming the circuit was dead. It was not, and luckily, neither was he, although it did take a few hours for him to stop glowing. We thought perhaps the refrigerator onboard was acting up but tests proved that it was working just fine. I called Pilot again in an attempt to get the situation with my credit card resolved. We finally got it worked out, but not until I was able to call my email provider, have them reset my password after calling ME back to verify my identity, and then logging into my web-based email on Hal’s laptop to see the email I’d just gotten from Pilot. They authorized the card. I took a few pictures around the spot, enjoying the clear, golden morning light of Ohio farm country.
Once on the road, Indiana beckoned about 90 miles west of us. The road was clear, very little traffic, we passed by Springfield and Dayton with no measurable excitement. The geography had flattened out considerably from yesterday’s up and down travel, so while not exciting, it was easy on the gas. I’m sorry that Ohio was not more memorable, but that’s the way it is.
I-70 was tree-lined and fairly flat as we headed west out of the last part of the eastern hills, into the midwest prairie. Dayton passed by almost unnoticed. As we neared the border with Indiana, we saw the big blue Ohio archway noting the edge of what used to be the western frontier of America.
Indiana Wants Me…
Our first state border crossing of the day into Indiana was encountered after about an hour and a half on the road. We kept an eye out for the Welcome Center, and pulled into in around 9, a sunny warm summer morning in the heartland. There were half a dozen semi’s and a few cars, and so I pulled in and Hal and Melissa went in to check it out. We collected brochures and maps, as usual. There was a “Welcome to Indiana” photo display of the governor and his lieutenant, and I was struck by the mirror image of Hal & Melissa looking at it. I took the time to wash the windshield, as the bugs were starting to become more numerous, and more desperate in their attempts to flatten themselves on the glass. We couldn’t use the wipers since I’d never gotten the washer fluid mechanism to work quite correctly, and without some liquid to wash them away, I only spread insect entrails all over the front. Soon enough, we were back on the road, headed towards Indianapolis and our next interstate junction
If the pic of the governor to the left looks familiar..it’s Mike Pence, chosen by Trump as his VP candidate in 2016….The Bounder awaited back in the parking lot, and we were off and running west across Indiana.
‘Round about Indianapolis
By mid morning, we were nearing Indianapolis. We ran into some construction around town, but it wasn’t too bad – the traffic volume was, to me, remarkably light for 10:30 on a nice Saturday in the summer. The bypass loop around Indianapolis was having some lanes added to it. It almost seemed that six full lanes was overkill, but perhaps around Indy 500 time, it might be barely adequate. The weather was still good, nice and clear, although it seemed the breeze was picking up.
River Crossing #5, the Wabash
We picked up I-74, headed northwest towards Illinois – Danville, home of the Van Dyke brothers, Champaign, Bloomington, Peoria, and points west. A bit before we crossed into Illinois, and gained an hour on the clock, we crossed over the Wabash River, just east of the state border into Illinois. It was our fifth major river crossing so far, only a day and a half into the trip.
The topography was still uneventful, just the occasional small valley with a creek at the bottom. We were gradually passing into the flat Midwest. The forest on either side of the road, which had been the norm so far in the journey, gave way to flat and seemingly endless fields of corn, soybeans, and other crops. Grain elevators shared the terrain with giant wind turbines. The wind turbines were new to me, the last time I’d been across country they were not even thought of. We saw them everywhere between Illinois and Wyoming.
Illinois – corn, grain, and wind
Somehow, we missed the Illinois Welcome Center. I’m not sure they even have one. The road was flat, straight, and somewhat boring. As we drove deeper and deeper into real farm country, the local seed merchants and grain elevators became more common. Between Champaign and Bloomington, we saw our first wind farm. On my last cross country trip, back in the mid 80s, there were of course none of these giant mills catching the breeze coming down from Canada and turning it into electricity. Now, they seem to be fairly common all across the Midwest. We saw them all the way to Utah. It seemed that many of the machines were not yet in operation. They sprouted out of the corn fields like gargantuan, arm-waving scarecrows.
River Crossing #6 – The Illinois River at Peoria
We bypassed around Peoria to the south, crossing the Illinois River. The highway department was resurfacing one bridge, so we bobbed and weaved over to the east bound lanes to cross the river. As we drove on through the heartland, Hal told us all about GMO corn, steel recycling, and motorcycle handlebar laws. It seems that handlebars reaching higher than the drivers shoulder blades are illegal. Somewhere. We saw dozens of flagrant examples of law breaking on the road.
At Galesburg, we made a sharp right turn, and headed directly north to the “Quad Cities” area – Davenport, Moline, Rock Island, and East Moline, all straddling the mighty Mississippi, and our connection to Interstate 80, which we’d follow the rest of the way west. I’ve always had a special liking for I-80. This nearly continent-wide ribbon of concrete and asphalt was truly, a “cross-section” of the U.S. Beginning more or less on the edge of Manhattan at the George Washington Bridge, it wound its way across north Jersey, shot from the Pennsylvania Poconos to Chicago in a rather featureless manner, bisecting the “rust belt”, and then rumbled across the Great Plains and the high desert of Wyoming before skimming Salt Lake City, the undulating Nevada desert basins and ridges, and the high Sierras. The Donner Party of unfortunate settlers chewed on each other not far from where I-80 scooted down out of Lake Tahoe, and it brought travelers all the way to the outskirts of San Francisco. We’d be on it from here at the Mississippi all the way to Salt Lake. Overall, I’d been on it almost every mile of it, at one point or another, but interestingly, the last chunks I followed were in my own home state of Pennsylvania. It runs across the very top of the Keystone state, nowhere near any major or even semi-major city. It’s overrun with trucks making the NYC to Chicago run.
River Crossing #7 – The Mighty Mississippi
The sky clouded up and we went from a nice, bright sunny day to a rather overcast and threatening sky, but the temperature stayed warm – mid 80s at least, with a hot breeze as well. I remember little about the distance from Peoria to the Quad Cities and the Mississippi crossing. When we crossed the river at LeClaire on I-80, the sky was clouding over completely, and I was driving, so Melissa took this picture. Any faults are mine for the poor stability control.
Iowa, and the Big Truck Stop
We crossed into Iowa about 3:30 PM. and our next destination was the famous “I-80 Truck Stop”, self-billed as the largest truck stop in the world. If you’ve never been to a big truck stop out west, you’ve missed an interesting part of Americana. Yeah, we have the occasional Pilot or Flying J kind of place here in the East, but out west, there’s room to roam, and the places are huge in comparison. Usually, their prices are higher than a ‘regular’ gas ‘n’ go place, but these big places have an entertainment value it’s hard to put a price on. This place has everything from an on-site chiropractor to a huge truck-oriented chrome plated gift shop. Need a new 400-gallon diesel tank? How about 6000 reflective running lights? An air horn that plays “Never on Sunday”, “La Cucaracha” or any of 20 other tunes? Yep, we got ’em… The place is only about 20 miles into Iowa, so we followed the signs, and soon enough, there we were. The skies were leaden and grey, threatening rain but I don’t remember any falling. We went in and wandered round the place, Melissa bought souvenirs for the kids and all back home, postcards and the like. You can be sure a place is big if they have three full-size, 60-foot long tractor trailers parked inside, in the aisles!! It was too early for dinner so we passed on the restaurant, Dairy Queen, Wendys and other assorted places to load up on carbs and fat. I took some pictures in the chrome shop and out in the lot Hal and M posed for a shot.
Des Moines, Chicken, and finding a place to park
We headed west to Des Moines. The road was as predicted, flat and featureless. Corn, wheat, soybeans, wind turbines, and, interestingly, the odd oil derrick. The price per barrel being what it was in 2012, it was now worthwhile to pump even ten or twenty barrels a day out of the sandstone and Jurassic shale lying underneath much of the prairie. Geologically, the great American Midwest perched atop a huge chunk of tectonic plate that hadn’t changed much in about 2 billion years. Unlike the geological toddler Himalayas, or even the late-adolescent Rockies next door, this chunk of dirt was a geriatric pensioner of geology and yet hosting some of the most fecund topsoil on the planet. Iowa alone produces more corn than the rest of the world put together.
Approaching Des Moines, we hit a rainstorm that did a lot to clear the air and lower the humidity. We stopped just outside the city proper, about 6PM for dinner, and had a very nice time confusing the poor young counter clerk at a Church’s Fried Chicken joint. Hal has a talent for completely clouding the mind of anyone trying to take his order at a restaurant. Nevertheless, it was a decent meal, and we relaxed a bit in the parking lot of the place. The air was clearing, and it appeared that the rain had passed, and Des Moines had that ‘just-rained-clean-smell’ about it.
We got back on the road west – we had no particular destination in mind for our overnight. My goal for the day had been Des Moines, so I felt any mile west of it was a bonus for our schedule. It was still light, around 7:30 or so and as we left the city behind us, we rolled over the very first sections of Interstate 80 ever put down, from back in 1958. Due to the time change, we’d picked up an hour, as noted, and apart from the hour or so at the truck stop, and the hour for dinner, we’d been rolling along at a good clip. It got dark around 8:30 or so, and we pulled into a rest stop along I-80. We had been told that overnight parking was allowed at the interstate rest stops in Iowa – some states prohibit it, for safety reasons, but evidently Iowa had patrols that wandered through the places on a regular basis all night, keeping the brigands at bay. The one we pulled into had two or three long lanes at which about a dozen or so trucks were parked for the night. I got out and took some artsy shots of the place, and even got one or two of those “car brake lights” long exposures of the traffic on I-80 passing by. We got settled in, but after a few minutes we realized an important point – the noise here was just as bad as at the Pilot the preceding night. Diesel trucks, especially reefers, tend to run their engines 24×7 for purposes of cooling, heating, and generating electricity for the drivers TVs, computers, microwaves, and satellite dishes. We knew it was too nerve-wracking to stay there for the night.
I checked the maps and guidebooks, and found the nearest Walmart about 45 miles further west, in Atlantic. We headed there. Following our GPS, we found the exit off I-80, and headed south into the Iowa darkness. Atlantic is about 6 miles from the Interstate, and one doesn’t know true darkness until one is about four miles down a narrow, unlit, Iowa county road at 10 pm on a Saturday night. We finally found the little burb, and of course, the lights of the Walmart were a welcome sight. We parked out at the edge of the parking lot and shut down for the night. Or so we thought.
Boom, Boom, on go the lights
There’s not much to do in Atlantic, Iowa on a Saturday night. One diversion that the local ‘youths’ have developed is driving up to a parked and sleeping RV in the Walmart parking lot around midnight and, creeping up slowly, banging the hell out of the side of the RV right below the bedroom window. Melissa and I shot up like Jack-in-the-box’es, and heard the kids giggling and running back to their car. She and Hal and I ran out and confronted them, and oddly enough they professed total innocence. They must have really thought we were stupid, as theirs was the only car within about 200 feet. In any case, we gave them a piece of our minds, and as we went around the RV to go back in side, we spied a police car making the rounds, so we flagged it down. The officer, who appeared to be in the same high school class as the vicious lawbreakers still loitering on the other side of the RV, said he more or less knew what was going on, and, in true Mayberry RFD style, said he knew their parents and that he’d make sure they got a proper comeuppance. He went around and chased them away. The rest of the night passed in with only minor interruptions, as the local drag races were held outside next to us at 2 AM, 3AM, 4AM and 5AM. We awoke at 5:05 as the stone that puts the stars to flight came in the windows, and set the Sultan’s throne alight.
Day 2 – 717 miles!
Total Number of States: 4
Back to Day 1 Here Ahead to Day 3 Here