Distance covered today: 176 miles
Distance covered total: 1,351 miles
Estimated mileage remaining: 2,149 miles (61% left to go)
I ended up spending a couple days in Chicago, where my big city livin’ didn’t get much wilder than riding on the El (their mass transit rail system) and eating some Mexican food. Even so, I was glad to have taken advantage of at least a couple elements of urban life, since Chicago was the last major city that I’d encounter for the remainder of the trip (not to sell my upcoming stops in Omaha, NE and Ames, IA short, and technically I’d nick the outermost fringe of the Denver metropolitan area during my eventual stay in Boulder, but you get the point).
Chicago also marked the end of the road for my lengthy run along U.S. Highway 20. I’d driven nine different swaths of Route 20 through six different states, and probably would not have as long a run on any other road the rest of the way. I’d also be taking a slightly more southerly course along 20’s counterparts numbered in the 30s, which brings me to a quick tangent about highway numbers. Before planning this trip, I had known the closely guarded secret that even-numbers denoted highways oriented east to west, while odd numbers marked those going north to south, but had never noticed that with U.S. Highways (not to be confused with interstates, U.S. Highways or “Routes” are the ones with the black and white signs) are given progressively higher numbers the farther south and west you go (the opposite pertains to the Interstate system: I-90 is in the north, I-10 is in the south, I-5 goes down the West Coast, I-95 goes down the East Coast). So there is actually some semblance of order governing a well-disguised set of numbers that- until recently- had seemed almost random to me. Good to know, in case all else fails and I ever need to navigate solely by highway number.
Setting out for the much more sparsely populated interior of the country, one thing I wouldn’t miss was Chicagoland’s obscene volume of traffic and layers upon layers of suburbs, which took me almost a couple hours to breach. After passing through inner-ring suburbs and then middle-distance suburbs, I still had to hurdle satellite communities like Naperville and Aurora, once their own separate entities but long since engulfed by sprawl. And beyond those come the “exurbs” such as Yorkville, where cookie-cutter McMansions and strip malls have been plopped onto recently developed farmland. I find these exurbs, 50 miles beyond Chicago’s city limits, to be a hideous abomination of the times when developers acted (and in some cases are still acting) as though the price of gas would never go up and the price of homes would never diminish. Those factors had made exurbs alluring in the first place, but since neither holds quite as true anymore, exurbs are falling on tough times (this point is echoed in the brief article, “The Curse of the Exurbs”, linked to at the bottom, if you’re interested). Like I said back in my Cleveland entry, hopefully we’re learning the lesson that such diffuse settlement isn’t the way to go.
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| GPS? The only thing I need to navigate is the setting sun, like this one in Chicago. |
There finally came a point though, when Chicagoland came to an end, yielding to archetypal scenes of the Midwestern farm life, made even more magnificent by the perfect weather. While some people might have found cornfield after cornfield to get a bit monotonous, I didn’t mind it for the time being (although I wondered how sick I’d get of the agrarian landscape by the time central Nebraska rolled around). The farmland was interrupted only by the occasional small town or some massive grain elevator, ethanol distillery, or canning/processing facility. I had officially entered the cradle of big time American agribusiness.
One of the day’s most notable spectacles came just west of the town of La Moille, where I happened upon one of the largest wind farms that I’ve ever seen. As a former salesman of wind energy credits (an odd job of mine back in high school), I’m a little biased in my wholehearted endorsement of wind power, but I can’t really understand the firestorm of controversy that these things incite. I don’t think they’re unsightly at all, but instead find them majestic and awe-inspiring. Some criticize them for killing birds, but I feel as though the alternatives (powerlines and unabated global warming) would kill even more. Especially out here on the lonesome, windswept prairie, generating wind power amidst cornfields represents as good a form of land use as anything.
As smoothly as the breeze through the turbines, eventually I coasted into the town of Walnut, IL. To call Walnut a “sleepy” town would overstate the level of activity there. “Comatose” might be more like it. Anyway, in Walnut I stopped to try to put some air in my tires, which had been a big priority ever since talking to the scooter guys in South Bend. I’d tried to find air sooner, but the pumps at a lot of gas stations have nozzles that wouldn’t quite fit the Metro’s petite tires. The gas station in Walnut was no exception, but they told me to try at an auto garage across the street. At the garage, I met a friendly attendant who hooked me up with a free pressure check and some good banter to boot. When he found out that I had driven the scooter from New York (and beyond), he let out a holler of “gee whiz!” It was the first time I’d heard someone less than 40 years old use “gee whiz” as a serious exclamation of surprise. Maybe it hasn’t yet fallen out of favor in the lexicon of the good people of Walnut. After finishing with the tires, the good-natured Gee Whiz Guy joked that he didn’t want me getting any speeding tickets since he’d feel guilty for having lent my scooter illegally blazing speed.
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| From the Windy City to a windy cornfield. |
He needn’t have worried, ‘cause it was the same old 30 mph the rest of the way to the Quad Cites region, of which my destination of Rock Island is a part. I got crossed up a little bit with my directions as I crept closer, and needed to take some more gravel roads to remedy the situation, at one point getting stuck at an automatic light that the scooter was too small to turn green. I didn’t see the Mighty Mississipp’ on my way into town, but was looking forward to the highly symbolic river crossing in the morning.
In Rock Island I stayed with the parents of a friend from school and was treated to more of the top-notch hospitality that I was coming to expect from the Carleton network. It was as if the cultural phenomenon known as “Minnesota Nice” gets swept down river and deposited in downstream towns along the banks. Just as I had in Chicago, I felt another sense of accomplishment for having reached the Mississippi. Gee whiz!
Shout-Outs:
-Gee Whiz Guy.
-The Noe family in Rock Island for hosting me for the night and outfitting me with maps for the next several states! They were hugely helpful.
Town(s) of the Day:
-Mendota, IL
Further Reading: Curse of the Exurbs
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