Here is what Illinois looks like:
Iowa and Nebraska look much the same, only with hills now and then. Today's scenery was a relentless succession of cows and corn, corn and cows, seen through a windshield spattered with suicidal bugs. What happens to all this corn? Certainly no one can eat this much popcorn and corn on the cob. Maybe it all becomes Wesson.
The cat did not have a good morning; she cried for two hours. We finally decided to let her stretch her legs on the lawn at the Iowa Welcome Center just over the Illinois border, a little clapboard building on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. There she did her feline part to advance international diplomacy, attracting the attention of a carload of tourists from the Czech Republic who were driving from New York to Los Angeles. One of the tourists exclaimed at Surely's size, told me she missed her own three cats, and cooed kitty endearments in Czech. Miss Thing, however, was having none of it and kept trying to scuttle into the bushes. Later, after our lunch break, she had an accident in her carrier. After that, though, she settled down for a 200-mile nap.
In the "weird religious things" category, we passed a big rusty yellow van with a giant plywood cross strapped to the back and a sign on top suggesting certain Bible readings. He was only doing about 60 on the Iowa highway, probably because all that plywood caused a fair bit of wind resistance, and we passed him before we could get our cameras out.
We've developed several rituals to mark our passage through the heartland. Whenever we pass an exit, we look up the town name in our AAA tour guides to see if it has any historical buildings or strange background. Today we learned about the Amana Colonies, founded by a Lutheran sect which lived communally until the '30s and went on to invent washing machines and build expensive appliances. (We stopped near there for a lunch of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches with fries, which were not up to the high standard set by those we ate on Sunday.)
When we cross into a new state, Melanie also looks over the map in our road atlas and finds all that state's towns with strange names. Some of today's favorites: Energy, Grand Detour, Aroma Park, Home Town, and Industry, Illinois; Atlantic, Correctionville, Early, and Swisher, Iowa; and the best so far, Wahoo, Nebraska. I have to wonder how that happened. Maybe the town's founders were just darn glad to get out of their covered wagons.
Melanie has had an overwhelming, irrational, and completely inexplicable desire to see Nebraska since before we began this trip. When we crossed the Missouri River into the outskirts of Omaha, I expected her to have a vision or revelation. No such luck; she just snapped a picture of the "welcome to Nebraska" sign as we sped under it. We cruised eventlessly through Omaha and past Lincoln, keeping a wary eye on a thunderhead mushrooming off to our left, and decided to stop for the night at yet another Super 8, this one in the tiny town of Seward, six miles off the highway. Seward has a Wal-Mart, a historic town square with cobbled streets, one Chinese restaurant and two cafes (which were all closed), a pizza place called Valentino's which serves pepperoni pizza with cream cheese, and a "Hinky Dinky" supermarket where a checkout clerk informed us that we were out of luck if we were looking for a decent meal anywhere in town. We had the pizza buffet at Valentino's.
So far we've stuck with Super 8 motels because they're clean, quiet, inexpensive, and conveniently located. This one overlooks a corn field. It's small, cute, and cheap, but there's an odd smell in our room and no others are available. The 60-something manager brought us a can of air freshener instead.
I would give anything for a fresh vegetable. You'd think you could get veggies easily in farm country, but no, the menu here is usually deep-fried breaded something-or-other with a side of potatoes. We bought some fresh fruit at the Hinky Dinky, but I'm afraid vitamin supplements are the only things standing between me and a bad case of scurvy.
