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.

Road Trip Part 1. The departure and the quirks and quickness of time

Who was it who said that if you've got time to write a diary, you probably haven't got anything interesting to write in it?  Maybe that was just a general comment that came from anyone who felt they couldn't really be bothered to write one.  Whatever the case, I'm certainly facing the difficulty of sitting down to write about what's been happening, when the general timetable since leaving Illinois has been to drive all day, find somewhere to eat at about 6ish and then get into a motel at 8 and battle with the quirks of that particular motel's internet connection to plan and organise where we're going to go the next day before dropping dead at about 11pm.    However, we have stayed in our current location for a couple of days in a row now, though not in the same motel, and that's given me a teensy bit of time to sit and write something now.

Back at the start of our journey, we had all sorts of airport delights to deal with.  Not least being in the nondescript surroundings of Prague airport at 5am.  5am is truly a miserable time to be awake and trying to function.  And Prague airport isn't exactly entertaining or comfortable.  

But when we got to Schipol in Amsterdam it was a little easier to cope, being that there were several eccentric little shops

 and more comfortable seating and even a library!  Woohoo!

The flight to Chicago was a battle of the mind.  I decided to cope with being boxed in in tightly packed seats for the 8.5 hour flight by sleeping for as much of the beginning of it as possible, to help me get on Chicago time.  This meant missing the main meal but was probably better for my tummy that way.  I watched the latest Muppet movie and was rather disappointed with it, but it helped to divide up the time and eventually we were on our descent and we got in a tiny bit ahead of schedule.

Getting through security was ok in the end, though we did have to wait in the long queue of 'scum', i.e. non-residents, for about 40 minutes.  And they've got all our fingerprints now.  So they can track us down.  Which is a bit of a worry considering we almost got ourselves arrested when we took photos in a supermarket in the suburbs of Illinois the next day.  

Two security guards (yes, two!) came over to us and said that some customers had been a bit concerned about why we were taking photos in a supermarket.  So my Mum jumped in before either of us could say anything, to reply, "Oh it's just that they're from the Czech Republic and they were amazed at how big everything is here and how much there is!  They were really surprised at how big the watermelons are and the rows and rows of chocolates."  To which the security guards, stunned by compliments about the abundance of America, said, "oh ok Ma'am" like little puppies lapping up praise and apologising for almost missing out on it.  I just stood there and smiled and inwardly thought how incredible it was that they had automatically taken everything my Mum had said at face-value.

So there you have it.  Paranoia and a failure to recognise irony is alive and well in the State of Illinois.  God bless America.