The Longest Day

Day 3 was probably the longest driving day of the trip, 535 miles, starting in the Quad Cities (Rock Island, IL, to be specific) and ending in Grand Island, NE. We arrived at 8pm, feeling pretty tired after driving over 1,000 miles in two days. Linda has to be at the dialysis center at 6am, which means the alarm clock is set for 5am, which means that she's resting and will post her next blog tomorrow. Good news when we got to the room; it has a coffee pot and coffee, so we won't have to go looking at 5:30 am for the coffee she needs to feel human in the morning. When she gets a chance she'll tell you how tough it was to get coffee in Iowa.

It was a long day but a good day which ended with a 20-minute rainbow as we covered the last stretch of the drive into Grand Island. Road work in the Quad Cities caused us to take a roundabout way to I-80, but did afford us a view of one of the strangest things we're likely to see on the trip. As we passed through LeClair, IL, we spotted a large "For Sale" sign on a large building up on a hill. A closer look revealed that it was the LeClair Welcome Center. I've been searching to the punch line to this joke all day. Is this a sign that local governments are in such financial trouble that they can't afford to pay the bills on their own building? Are they no longer interested in welcoming people? Or did they dispense so much welcoming good will that they simply ran out and couldn't keep going? Very strange. That reminds me that I can't put off sharing the "Line of the Week" so far. That came from Linda yesterday, when discussing her dislike of camping: "For me, roughing it means driving with the windows down."

We had arranged to have lunch in Des Moines with R. J. Lesch, a fellow baseball historian I've known for ten years. All of us arrived at 12:30 pm at the Iowa Machine Shed, a tribute to Iowa farmers which we enjoyed very much. Linda tried chicken fried steak for the first time after being deprived of her anticipated Eggs Benedict yesterday in Cleveland. For some inexcusable reason, the restaurant there didn't serve their normal Sunday brunch menu yesterday, so that treat still lurks for later in the trip. We had a fine time with R. J. and hit the road around 2 pm.

After backtracking about 20 miles, we headed north to Ames, where we turned onto the Lincoln Highway. I wanted to drive at least some of this historic cross-country road this month, and we're very glad that we did. We covered 160 miles, about half of it on a two-lane road, going from Ames to just north of Omaha. It felt good to get off the interstate ribbon for one afternoon on the westward haul, and we traversed a lot of Iowa farm country and small towns that seemed especially sleepy on Labor Day. We saw field after field of brown corn stalks so dry we figured the whole state could go up in flames with one match and 3mph breeze. But the soybean fields, acre after acre, seem to be doing well, and we liked those bright yellow flowers atop the stalks. Linda was taken with all the trains hauling coal into the middle of the farming country (I counted 140 cars on one train) and with the enormous granaries. Driving across Iowa made us more acutely aware of just how precarious it is for a farmer trying to forge a livelihood while at the mercy of a fickle climate. They've had it rougher than usual this summer, and we'll all be paying for that.

We rejoined I-80 just west of Omaha for the final two-hour push to Grand Island. It feels good to be on the road ahead, cruising along on good conversation and good music. Today we listened to a fine assortment of CDs: a Leo Kottke CD with 12-string guitar and no vocals, Ella Fitzgerald and the Irish Tenors with glorious vocals, and Justin Hayward's fine solo effort, "A View From the Hill." Good music makes a long drive seem not so long, and it definitely helped today. Finally got to the room, connected to the internet after some difficulty, and found assorted messages and comments from many friends on our blogs so far. We hope you'll continue along with us on our travels, and Linda will have a report tomorrow on her first dialysis treatment.