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Saturday, December 25, 2010

Driving across the Great Plains



































I finally left the house a few minutes shy of 11am last Tuesday. I drove along the border on USHwy 90, through Douglas and the heavily-surveilled area NE of town where Rancher Bob was killed earlier this year. There were several Sheriff and USBP vehicles all along that stretch, but I never saw any people. It's as if all those who had wanted to be with family over the holiday had already left for the trip. Weather on the first day was ideal: warm, blue sky and little traffic.

There were more USBP along NM9, another eerie but pretty road that hugs the border. I turned north when I got to Columbus, and drove I-10 into Las Cruces.

I had a major blowout on the transition ramp from I-10 and I-25, just as the evening was setting. My saving grace was that I wasn't driving fast when my tire blew, there wasn't much traffic and I was able to pull off the road and call AAA. (The first things the dispatcher asked me was if I was safe and if I was safely off the road; I answered "yes" to both). My van has Chinese-made Hankook tires I was coerced into buying. I will never buy that brand again.

That blowout cost me $188 and three hours of driving. I missed watching the rising Solstice Full Moon over White Sands. Lesson learned. I ate dinner at a Carl's Jr and read more of "Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant Vol I" while eating, so all was not lost.

However, despite a new tire the tire pressure monitor remains lighted. I hope it's just the cold weather.

I only made it 540 miles that first night, pulling over south of Clovis, NM to a cool-to-cold night with the cows. The next morning there was a chilling fog across the valley that followed me well into Armarillo, TX and the Panhandle. I was now no longer in the desert but in the cold Staked Plains that Mark and I had explored a few years before. I will always enjoy that area and its red soil. It was here that I began seeing unique roadside attractions like giant Cowboys, antique cars and plastic cows on top of old slaughter houses. It's a photographer's delight with the variety of things to capture.

I didn't warm up until I neared the Oklahoma border on Day II and stopped at an interstate rest stop designed like a Route 66 museum. The place offered clean rest rooms and free WiFi. The rest stop was also a designated tornado shelter (built on a hill top?!) The rest of the drive from Oklahoma to Springfield, IL followed old Route 66, although the old Route 66 was mostly an old frontage road along the interstate.
The drive was very scenic, and it remained scenic even across Oklahoma, which was not anywhere near as flat and ugly as I remembered it to be. I was expecting to be inundated with religious messages along the interstate, and although I did see a lot of churches and ministry buildings in OKC (I believe the majority of them are in OKC), I also saw my share of ADULT BOOKSTORE billboards near the churches. Churches and pornography go so well together here

I avoided the Toll Road and existed I-44 outside Oklahoma City, driving eastward on a parallel road north of the city that went straight into Tulsa to the Missouri state line, where I saw another near full moon rise over the flatlands. I made it to Springfield, MO where I got a room at the "Ozark Inn" that offered me a comfortable bed for the night and a decent cable TV selection, but in which the heat never got warm enough to get comfortable in.

My final drive was across Missouri and into Illinois and arriving in Northwest Indiana at 9pm at my daughter's place. By the time I reached Kankakee, IL I could see the darkbrown rusty northern horizon of Chicagoland, I could smell the steelmill sulphur and I knew I didn't have much further to go. It also felt warmer there than it did in central MO where my van thermometer dipped into the upper 20s.

I liked what I saw of Missouri off I-44 but by the time I got to that state I was getting antsy of the drive and wanted to make good time. I hope to enjoy parts of the Ozarks on my return trip; I may even drive the same way as I drove going out as it was scenic, diverse and historic. I didn't even see ground snow until I crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois, and that is where I lost the blue sky for the rest of my travel.
Kevin says I made good time on this drive. I only pushed myself on Day II because of the lag I started with on Day I. I only stopped to pee and gas up; most of my food came from eating salted peanuts from a plastic jar. Rather than listening to local PBS stations (I did that only for hourly newscasts a few times a day), I entertained myself splendidly listening to audio books: Laura Bush's "Spoken from the Heart" and "The autobiography of Mark Twain" which was a true delight once I got past the first two introductory discs.
The price for gasoline remained steady across the Plains, $2.79-$3.09. I paid mostly $2.79 and only once paid $3.09 in central Illinois. Prices were higher the closer I got to Chicago ($3.34 was the highest) but dropped to just below $3 when I crossed into Indiana.
It's a 1950-mile drive that can be comfortably driven in 4-5 days and I plan on taking my time going back, perhaps exploring more of "the middle." all that is weather-dependent, as that storm that blew across California on Monday came through here last night with 3-4" of snow. It's the Upper Northeast that is going to get hit hard tomorrow, from DC all the way to Maine. It's been a year since the last blizzard there.

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