Road Trip-Leaving Illinois

(from previous post) I had breakfast at the counter and brought in the Atlas in to peruse.  By the looks of it all the other diners were  having the buffet.  I knew what I wanted before I sat down.  Fried mush with eggs.  As I waited for my order to come up I opened the road atlas to Illinois and looked at where I might go next.  The Dixie was as far as I’d figured it out.

In my mind this road trip was a river run.  I wanted to follow the Mississippi, more or less, skip New Orleans and cut over to Pensacola where I would join Ottawa friends flying in for a four day golf trip.  Though I was going south and east in the end, I first wanted to get to America’s big river.  I found McLean in the atlas and considered my options.  Then breakfast arrived.

The mush wasn’t that good.  Identical oblong patties, fried too long and tough, suggested frozen patties.  They looked like those bad slabs of so called hash browns.  However the eggs were good.  Nice runny yolks like over easy should be.  I had to remind my young waitress to bring the milk, which happens a lot.   They pour your coffee right away and forget you want another beverage. 

If I was doing the Route 66 trip I would follow I 55.  There are preserved stretches of Old 66, scraps of pavement really, and old roadside attractions, scattered along the way.  But I took 55 to Springfield so many times over so many years I dreaded the thought.  Why could I not have lived in the days of self driving cars when I was making all those trips to the Capitol to find money and promote good policy for troubled kids?  I’d been down that road too many times.  I nixed that idea.

What’s best on these trips is a good old two lane state highway, or any road actually with a line painted down the middle.  Those roads have less stop signs and are more likely to be somewhat direct.  They’re slower, but unlike the interstate you can pull off and walk into real country, meet real people.  And if this really was a river run, why not get to a river and follow it to the Mississippi? Look there I thought.  Route 136 would take me to Havana on the Illinois River.  From there I could get on 78 and parallel the river to Alton, cross into Missouri at St. Louis, then hug the river going south.  Perfect.

Something was drawing me to St. Louis and I wasn’t quite sure what.  I celebrated a wedding anniversary there, which one I couldn’t tell you, in an old historic hotel years ago and have fond memories of that great, but not too big, American city.  Plus, I’d get to see the Mississippi River where it is joined by the Missouri but before the Ohio River kicks in.  It’s a magnificent river, the Mississippi, and between St. Louis and just below Cairo it changes dramatically.

I paid for my breakfast at the Dixie, put the decal on the Buick, and headed west on Route 136.  If I’d ever been west on that road I don’t remember it.  As much as I like to go down familiar roads nothing beats discovering new places.  I went through San Jose, which in the pattern of Illinois towns named after other more famous places is pronounced “San Joes”  in the unlikely event you might confuse that little Midwest town for its more famous namesake in California, or Costa Rica.  Similarly, my neighbors in Marseilles take pains to say “Marr Sales”, so you don’t mistakenly think you’re in a Mediterranean port on the coast of France. 

I met up with the Illinois River in Havana, pronounced just like the capitol of Cuba.  Havana looks to be doing pretty well.  New stores and well paved streets.  I worked with a good guy from Havana and have lost touch with him since I retired.  In the event he still reads this blog, I hope you’re doing well Greg. 

As I got closer to the river, irrigation equipment started showing up.  That’s not common in Illinois, and indicates not a lack of rainfall but soil that doesn’t hold moisture well.  Sandy most likely.  You get down to places like Manito and Spring Lake where they grow melons and stuff and you figure the ground is changing.  It’s more expensive to farm irrigated ground.  Given the prices farmers get for grain these days and the cost of growing it I honestly don’t know how they’re making it.

Route 78 took me to Bath.  I was interested in Bath, because my brother takes his boat down there from where he camps across from Kingston Mines.  He talks about it from the perspective of the river.  There’s the famous Bath Ditch, and a restaurant on a barge in the river, or is that in Liverpool?  I’m not sure he’s seen Bath from the road.  Bath may have seen better days, or not.  I’m no authority.  But Bath is low lying, and it looks like floods may have taken their toll on the town’s real estate.  Just guessing but I bet you can buy a house very reasonably in Bath.

Bath bears little resemblance to Bath England just as I doubt Liverpool resembles that famous British town on England’s Atlantic coast.  310 people live in Bath, and it appears the town is most famous for its Redneck Fishing tournament.  I’ve reviewed it online and it is not your average contest.

In this non angling contest fishing poles are not allowed.  Loud flat bottomed Jon boats with outboard motors troll the muddy water while contestants line the boat with large dip nets.  They are after Asian Carp, an invasive species that threaten native fish populations in the Illinois River and elsewhere throughout the country.  This is not a catch and release tournament.  The object is to get as many of these big ugly fish out of the water as possible.  Did I say they drink a lot of beer at the Redneck Fishing Tournament?  It’s a colorful event.

From Bath I veered away from the river through the towns of Chandlerville, Virginia, and finally Jacksonville.  I got goofed up there.  Determined not to use my smart phone to bail myself out, why I’m not sure, I took some kind of alternate route, looped around the main drag, ended up losing Route 78 and unable to find Rt. 267, the road I wanted to take south. 

I don’t try to figure out what I do wrong in those cases, I just plow on.  I stopped for a very old fashioned thing, to get directions, at an office where I saw a guy getting the mail from a mailbox on a post by the street. I was stopped at a light.

You can get the mail with purpose, in a hurry, on your way to doing something else.  Or you can get the mail for a diversion, searching for something to do.  This guy was obviously in the latter category.  He leaned against the mailbox, flipping through the envelopes, checking out the cars, smiling and waving at folks he knew.  As he sauntered across the street into his building I followed him. 

It was the office of Worrell Land Services, which told me nothing.  All I wanted was directions.  Any competent English speaker, or even someone speaking Spanish slowly, would do.

I encountered two women behind a counter in a large, very quiet office.  They both came up to greet me.  Sometimes you wander into places where you immediately sense there is not enough to do.  This was one of those places.  Both women were equally attentive, wide eyed and smiling.  They might have spoken at once, but I think one of them beat the other to it.  Their eagerness was a little intimidating.

“How can we help you?”

“I’m just lost.  I thought I was going to intersect 267 which would take me to south to Greenfield but I got off track.  Where would I find that?”

The face of the woman standing fell.  She was clearly disappointed. 

“I’m not from here so I can’t tell you.”

On the other hand the woman on the left grew pretty animated.

“I can tell you!  Which way are you headed?”

“I’m in your parking lot.  I’ll go anywhere you say.”

“Well, you want to take a left out of our parking lot, head back east, and follow this road down to the city park.  You’ll see a Ferris wheel there.  Do you know the history of Jacksonville and Ferris wheels?”

I hesitated to answer.  Avoiding long conversations about things I don’t care about is not my strong suit.  I hate to be rude.  But in this case I had to pee like a racehorse.  As much as I would have liked to hear about the Jacksonville Ferris connection, which was not much at all, I had no time to listen.

“I don’t know the Ferris wheel deal, but I’m afraid I will have to hear that story another day.  I’m behind schedule as it is.”

I had no schedule. 

“Oh, of course.  Well you turn left and go let’s see, how many blocks?”

She began counting blocks silently on her fingers, starting with her thumb.  She started over.  Then she exploded with a shout.

“FRANK. HOW MANY BLOCKS FROM HERE DOWN TO THE PARK?”

There was a long pause, then a muffled reply from down the hall.

“Six.”

“Six blocks, then turn right, that’ll take you right to Greenfield.” 

She flashed a huge smile.

“Thank you very much.  You’ve been a big help.”

She stuck out her hand, I extended mine and she shook it vigorously, for a little too long. I got the slightly creepy feeling she would have hugged me if a counter hadn’t separated us.

“Do you folks have a bathroom I can use?”

“Of course.  All the way down the end of the hall and right. You can’t miss it. Light switch is on the right.”

I turned and hustled down the long hall.  On my way back I noticed picture after picture of small farms, sets of  buildings from an aerial view.  Some looked like our old farm, buildings in poor repair, while others looked pristine and newly painted.  Old pictures I guessed.

I passed a nice looking conference room with plush leather looking chairs, and a big office with the mail fetcher sitting motionless behind a big desk, his face illuminated by a computer monitor displaying an Excel spreadsheet.  He looked positively bored.

On my way out I grabbed a pamphlet, thanked the ladies again, and followed their directions.

267 south to Jacksonville takes you through what some would call a big empty part of Illinois. To me it wasn’t empty at all.  Sometimes it seemed like the road intruded on what would have otherwise been a giant fallow prairie waiting to sprout.  Past Woodson there was only Greenfield, Medora and Brighton as far as towns, between Jacksonville and Godfrey.  Otter Creek runs through there.  It’s Macoupin County I believe.  Nice farms.  Little to spoil them.  The Buick was humming along.  The sun was shining though clouds were moving in.  This is what I was looking for; big quiet country.  It’s a place where you can think.  I still hadn’t turned on the radio.

As I got close to Alton and the river, everything changed.  The city emerged.  I knew upriver the Illinois, which flows through my town, had joined the Mississippi.  It is hard to find an old bridge on a small road to take you across the Mississippi.  I got sucked into traffic and was thrown onto a modern bridge across the river before I knew it.  Unlike old bridges,  new bridge construction creates solid side walls that make it hard to see the river.  I wanted to gauge the flow, see what was floating down, but I was going too fast and my view was obstructed.  Sometimes you have to drive rather than gawk.  All I could see was that it was wide.

No sooner had I gotten across the Mississippi river and into Missouri than I was heading up and over the Missouri River, which looked equally big.  With both the Illinois and the Missouri emptying into the Mississippi the volume of water had to increase significantly.  After a quiet ride through farmland I picked up a sense of energy.  Maybe it is the confluence of all those rivers, but it felt like there was a lot going on in St. Louis, and somehow that energy made itself into the Buick.

It started to sprinkle.  I was in the midst of rush hour traffic.  To be expedient, and get out of town as quickly as possible, I stayed on 55, forsaking 61, the two lane which might have taken me south more slowly, past Festus and Crystal City.  Somewhere in there the sprinkle turned into rain. I stayed on 55 till Perryville, then took 61, a two lane, down to Jackson and pulled in for the night at Cape Girardeau.  Long day.