Tuesday, April 10
Road trip Day 2 - Springfield OH to Des Moines IA via I-70, I-74, I-80 and various surface roads. Distance traveled approximately 620 miles.
We were on the road by 7:30, fueled only with motel coffee and a banana from the "continental breakfast" spread offered by the lodgings. Our goal was to hold off on a real breakfast until we could get to Indianapolis and another "Roadfood" target, Shapiro's deli, which we found easily around 10.
Shapiro's is unusual for a "kosher-style" deli (meaning treyf is on the menu as well as meat/dairy combos, e.g. a Reuben sandwich) in that it's set up with a cafeteria line rather than menu service. Otherwise, it's huge, spotless, has a great take-away counter, the best café coffee we had on the trip, and absolutely wonderful food. Great, fab place, and well worth the 20 min. detour from the freeway. We bought bagels and a pound of corned beef (at the current, not
former price) for later consumption in the vast bagel-free zone that lay ahead, and were back on the road by 11 or so.
We left Indiana in our wake and roared across central Illinois to Galesburg, just east of the Mississippi. My wife and a co-worker have occasional business dealings in Galesburg (co-worked used to live and work there, and his wife at Knox College) so a quick look-around was non-negotiable. It's a pleasant town, but we didn't stay long since the weather looked increasingly threatening, and we had to leave time to seek out a dead musician in Davenport.
We crossed the river and made our way to downtown Davenport (one of the Quad Cities) so that brother-in-law (henceforth BIL) could see if anybody knew who Bix Beiderbecke was. (Bix was a famous jazz trumpeter who left Davenport at his earliest convenience.) The visitor center unloaded a couple of pounds of Bixalia on BIL, who grooved to scratchy home-copied CDs of Bix et al most of the way to Des Moines. Oh, en route we stopped for a burger at the Machine Shed restaurant just off the freeway, recommended by a Fodors correspondent. Too much food as it turned out.
By the time we got to the outskirts of Des Moines it was raining and sleeting and looked like nighttime during rush hour, so we found another freeway-side motel and called it a day. Dinner was half a bagel and some most excellent corned beef in front of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the motel TV. The forecast said snow.
Wednesday April 11
Road Trip Day 3 - Des Moines IA to Chadron NE via I-80, Nebraska Rt. 2, and US 385. Distance traveled approximately 610 miles.
And behold the snow did fall upon all the cars and all the peoples of Des Moines, and upon all the peoples of Iowa and upon their brethren in far Dakota and near Minnezota, and it was white.
About two inches on the ground, not really sticking to the roads, but nasty and cold. The TV and internet forecasts said it would likely snow 6 -10 inches along our planned route north to Sioux Falls, so we concluded as we left town to the west that we’d stay on I-80 into Nebraska, then cut up to I-90 before the Black Hills if conditions warranted, or in the worst case continue on to Wyoming and cut north on I-25. That meant missing the Corn Palace in Mitchell SD, but it wasn’t a Corn Palace kind of day anyway.
The snow continued to fall most of the way to the Missouri. We stopped for a late breakfast at a roadside café where we joined nine or ten farmers and a couple of their wives who were drinking coffee and kibitzing and coping with weather cancellations of card clubs and visits from GPS vendors (for tractor installations.)
By Omaha the snow had stopped and we made good time to Lincoln, where we got off the freeway so we could get a latte and also get lost for a little while. Drove past the Nebraska capitol building, which I believe was architected by the same firm that did the Empire State Building and the marvelous YMCA complex in Jerusalem, which the Capitol closely resembles.
At Grand Island we stopped for a (quite awful) lunch at an otherwise promising-looking truck stop, where we looked over or map and plotted the rest of the day. It looked like we could cut quite a few miles off our planned journey to Deadwood if we took Nebraska Route 2 through the Sand Hills, so that’s what we did. It was one of those inspired choices one stumbles into now and then.
Route 2 crosses some of the emptiest areas I’ve encountered in the lower 48. Not central-Nevada empty, but pretty close. But beautiful – rolling hills (sand dunes) clad in sagebrush and high-prairie grasses, the occasional cow or antelope, a couple of small towns with gas stations and grain silos, but precious few cars and even fewer folk, save a few cowboys drinking coffee at a truckstop. The sun even came out. The only sign of civilization for most of the route was a procession of miles-long trains, each with a couple hundred hopper cars full of coal, heading east to keep the lamps lit and make the globe warmer.
SR 2 connected to US 385 at Alliance NE, but any hope of making Deadwood that night was long dispelled, so we stopped at Chadron, the last town in Nebraska before the South Dakota line. Checked into a comfortable enough Best Western, and was given a key to a lovely room with only one negative trait, that being the unhappy occupant of said room when I opened the door with my card key. The counter person didn’t sound British, but displayed characteristic British hotelkeeper behavior when she paused to assess how the error could possibly have occurred, before getting an empty room for me. (Long ago I went through a hellish patch of “What’s the problem and who’s to blame?” incidents at the hands of various UK hoteliers and concluded that they’d all been taught that the assessment of fault was more important than customer satisfaction in cases of apparent screw-up.)
Dinner was at a totally packed Mexican restaurant (Angela's) on the main drag downtown. Very, very good, and that's just the tequila. Food was decent, too.