Grand Island and on to Detroit (posted from Panera Bread Co. in Detroit area)

(this post covers 16-19 September)

Tuesday, 19 September-
Yesterday we called Labashi’s parents from Clinton and told them we’d be there by mid-afternoon. Our drive from Valparaiso to Detroit was mostly uneventful though we kept hitting roadwork zone after roadwork zone. Fortunately I-94 is six-lane much of the way between Chicago and Detroit so we and the big trucks were just funneled into two lanes for much of it.
We arrived in the Detroit area by about 1400 but we wanted to drop off Labashi’s 14 rolls of film for overnight processing so we’d have them to show tomorrow. I had looked up an address for a national photo-processing chain that Labashi uses but that store turned out to have closed down—so much for Street Atlas 2006’s database of business phones and addresses. But we eventually found another in a very upscale mall (this one has valet parking!) and dropped off the film. And by 1600 we were at Mom and Dad’s house chatting away about our trip. We’ll stay a few days before heading home.

Monday, 18 September-
We had a great, very quiet night in the Sam’s Club parking lot—that has been the exception and when it happens it’s very nice. We drove across the remainder of Iowa today and into Illinois, all on US30, the famous Lincoln Highway. We were pleasantly surprised how rural the drive is. We paralleled train tracks the whole way and therefore the great majority of the towns were defined by their railroad sidings and grain terminals. Most of them consisted of just a few blocks of businesses on one side of the road and the railroad siding and mainline on the other. The fields are now quite different and it looks like the East. The changeover happened around Grand Island, NB, changing from the rolling sandhills of western and central Nebraska to the corn and soybean fields of eastern Nebraska. Iowa of course continued that trend, though we notice the fields are greener as we proceed east. This also meant, however, that we were back in mosquito-land. It was so nice to camp without any mosquitoes all through the west. We had a couple occasions when camping near horse corrals that we had lots of houseflies to contend with but at least they don’t bite.
Once we got to the Iowa-Illinois border at Clinton, we plotted our way past Chicago. I did not want to deal with the I-80 mess at Chicago so we just continued on US30. We only had one city—Joliet—to wend our way through and even that wasn’t a problem. But not long afterwards we were running into the end-of-day rush as we neared the Indiana line and that slowed us down. But then again we weren’t doing this to make time, we wanted to see what the area looks like. We eventually called a halt for the day at Valparaiso, IN where we once again took advantage of Wal-mart’s ok-to-park policy, though this ended up being a pretty noisy one throughout the night.


Sunday, 17 September-
This morning we went shopping for supplies at Wal-mart (after sleeping in till 0800) and I noticed that the front tire on Mocha Joe was wearing a bit oddly—feathering the outer edge of the tread. I decided to have the tires rotated and had that taken care of by the Wal-mart folks. We then got on the road and headed out via US30, the Lincoln Highway. Since I-80 and US30 run roughly parallel, I thought we’d try US30 and then if it gets too frustrating, we can switch over to the superslab of I-80. But our 300 miles of driving on 30 today was great… not much traffic and very nice country to travel through. By mid-afternoon we had crossed the Missouri River into Iowa and then the landscape changed from flat plains to rolling hills with long views across the rural landscape. Very nice. We stopped for the day in Ames, IA at a Sam’s Club.


Saturday, 16 September-
From Victoria Springs State Park we drove back to Nebraska Route 2, the Sandhill Scenic Route and, within an hour, to the railroad town of Grand Island, Nebraska. There we first stopped at Grounds to Go, a local coffee shop, for its free wi-fi connection and spent a couple of hours on email and uploading to the blog. I had a coffee there and read the local newspaper—the Independent-- while Labashi was using the computer.
We then visited the nearby Stuhr Museum of the Plainsman, a ‘gem’ in the AAA tourbook. Grand Island had a number of ‘lost’ businesses which the museum spotlighted. At one time the city had many cigar makers but the advent of the machine-rolled cheap cigarette doomed the industry. Another big industry at one time was sugar-beet production. But over time the sugar beets of the area had less and less sugar content and the industry failed. Another big industry was clothes tailoring—but standardization of sizes and Sears, Roebuck killed off that local industry. However, the best part of this museum is Railroad Town, a living-history museum. It’s a small town with re-enactors sprinkled throughout and represents the 1896-1910 period. We enjoyed talking to the re-enactors and they all did a good job. The spinster telephone-exchange lady explained how the switchboard worked. The shopkeeper, it turns out, grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and has her heart in her work here— it was fascinating to listen to her speak of managing the store. But the most fascinating was the millinery shop owner. Her ‘thing’ in life is ladies hats—the very old-fashioned type we see in the old westerns. And she’s good at it. She showed us example after example of hats she has re-created from period advertisements. She has a great thing going here. She can spend all the time she wants creating fanciful hats and doesn’t have to worry about it being profitable since she’s paid as a re-enactor and the hats are just something she does to keep busy.
After the museum we toured the town looking for a restaurant and settled on El Tapatio, a very nice little family-owned Mexican restaurant. We had an excellent meal of fajitas, a couple of margaritas each and a killer fresh guacamole.
After supper we drove to a local park but Labashi soon wanted to go searching for ‘the Murdock place’ which reportedly still has visible swales made by the wagon tracks of the original Mormons traveling through the area on their way from Nauvoo, IL to Utah. We found the place just as the sun set and had a brief look at the swale— not much to see there now but it’s the idea of it, I suppose.
Heading back toward our Wal-mart for the night we could see a tremendously-high clouds to the east and they had an odd look to them so I turned on the weather radio. A tornado watch was underway for the next two counties east of us and there was a thunderstorm watch for five counties for heavy thunderstorms “capable of producing four-inch hail”. By the time we made it to the Wal-mart we had a spectacular light show going on, still to our east. We’ve never seen lightning storms like this one, even on the Chesapeake. The clouds towered up 60 degrees from the horizon under them we could see a line of black clouds pouring down rain. Cloud-to-cloud lightning flashed time after time, both as ‘heat lightning’ and as massive lightning bolts. And we saw incredible bolts strike the ground and light up an entire quadrant of the sky. We knew we were in no danger because the storm was east of us and heading northeast at 55 miles per hour. But I still kept our weather-radio handy and checked the bulletins every once in a while to be sure.
After the storm passed, we turned in but almost immediately had a problem. There was a bar across the street from the Wal-mart called the Voo-Doo Lounge. And the Voo-doo Lounge had a very loud soundsystem that started cranking just about the time we went to bed. We put up with it for a while then decided to move. We had seen another Wal-mart earlier in the day so drove over to that one and all seemed well. Until the trains started. It turns out Grand Island is a railroading hub of some type and trains go through every twenty minutes or so, blowing their horns time after time after time as they cross intersections. We somehow caught naps between the trains but I swear I counted every horn blow. Not our best Wal-mart night.