Road Trip: Part 3: Hello Farm boy!

When we left the suburbs of north western Illinois, we had a bit of help to get to the interstate and negotiate the junctions by the fact that my parents decided to drive out to take us onto the I-88 in their mini-van.  My Dad was a bit jealous that we were getting to do this amazing trip, though he did admit, he would have been just as happy to be dropped down in Denver and go from there, rather than bothering to drive all the way through Iowa and Nebraska.  We waved goodbye to the friendly red mini-van at the junction for the I-80 and crossed the border into Iowa at about 4.30pm.  

Somewhere along the line, we really felt the sense of being on our own as we were driving along in our Nissan Altima, heading off into the sunset like all the best rambling, nomadic types do.  It felt right.  A bit lonely, a bit homeless, but somehow it was all right because this was the life of the trucker.  This is what it looked like:

There's a line in 'Star Trek : The Voyage Home' (no I'm not ashamed...) where Captain Kirk and the like end up in 1980s San Francisco and a woman he meets there asks him where he's from and when he replies, "Iowa", she says, " Oh, farm boy, huh?"  I never really knew anything about Iowa so I hadn't really thought about it much.  But as we made it there ourselves and all we ever saw out of the window was farmland, it clicked.  Yes, these are the plains.  (Well, when you reach Nebraska it's officially the plains.) 

Our first day ended just outside of Des Moines, when we called it a day and drove up to an Econolodge place and asked for a room.  It wasn't super-super cheap once you added on the tax, but it was a room.  And it had internet, albeit  quite a patchy signal.  And the guy at the reception desk made me laugh by the fact that he was astute enough to realise we weren't from the US, but not astute enough to distinguish my accent from that of a Russian speaker.  (Oops.  Bit further west mate..!)

Iowa and Nebraska looked like this:

And this: 

And this: 

Fascinating, huh?  No, we didn't think so either.  But the country radio was entertaining.  It had to be!  You can't survive out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do unless you have some silly nonsense songs to sing along to, right?  So in Iowa, we got lyrics like, "Where I come from there's corn bread and chicken, where I come from you gotta make a livin'" and on Nebraska's 93.1 "The River" country radio, we heard the delightful, "I want you to love me like my dog does Baby...he never says I wish you made more money...he don't get mad and throw a major fit when I say his sister is a bitch" [Billy Currington] and , "Am I the only one who wants to have fun? Is there anybody out there wants to have a cold beer, hang out til the mornin' light if I have to raise hell all by myself I will, but y'all know that ain't right get your good time on, let's have a good time tonight"  [Dierks Bentley]

Can you sense the desperation for connection with another human being in that last one?  When you're driving in the middle of Nebraska and all you can see is this

it all becomes clear.  There ain't no-one out here but farmers and cattle.  One's soul starts crying out, not for civilisation because that's long gone, but just the simple delight of a beer and a conversation with someone.  And I don't even like beer.