Operation Lily Put, Day 2: Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania

A slow start to the day, a trip to Casey's to get some breakfast snacks, and we were on the road!  We knew this was going to be a long, boring day.  I was looking for any excuse to take pictures or see something interesting.. anything!

We came upon a truck and I noticed it was a car carrier.  Not so much the kind with the shiny new vehicles on it, but a flatbed with a collection of cubes that used to be cars before they got compacted!  If you look closely, you can see a reflection of me squint you can see a tire sticking out on the right hand side of the image.

I do have to say one of the best things I've seen so far is a many laned highway that restricts trucks to the right hand two lanes.  So nice not to have to wait while two trucks have an "elephant race" lumbering past one another while those of us with only 4 wheels form a long line behind them.  It doesn't solve the problem of the white minivan that camps in the left lane, but the further east we go, the more people keep right and pop out to the left land just to pass.

The day before we'd started seeing these funny beehive shaped buildings.  I think I probably saw these before and just forgot, but we had to look it up.  They're for storing salt and sand for the street crews in the winter.  I think they're a little bosom-y, myself.  Once we got into Ohio we stopped seeing them.

Oh and another thing about Indiana..  The license plates have a covered bridge on them, and it took us a little bit of time to figure that out.  We didn't really have time to find a covered bridge, but I'm betting (hoping) that Pennsylvania has one or two, and we'll have a lot more time on Friday to go tilting windmills and looking for old bridges.  BTW, the bridge in Madison County was burned down due to arson in 2002.  So they rebuilt it.  And then it got burned down again in 2017.  Someone must really hate that movie.  Jill and I saw it in a drive in theater along with Free Willy 2:  The revenge but I don't remember much of it, we were still just dating back then.

And just when we thought Indiana couldn't get any more boring, we get walls on the side of the highway.  So we couldn't even look at the trees and barns on repeat.   Luckily it didn't last very long.  I think it was mostly on the Fort Wayne bypass.

So yeah, we didn't take the direct route that goes straight across easterly, through Cleveland and such.  It had more construction, and I wanted to avoid large cities, and to be honest it didn't sound fun at all.  So I played the "this route is only 10 minutes longer" (but you repeat it six times and now you're an hour slower) game.  When we go to the cabin if Jill is sleeping I can do that and stretch the drive out by another 45 minutes or so, but I get to go through tiny little towns and look at interesting old abandoned buildings.  In those towns.  Times are tough in Wisconsin.

Turns out Lily and I share a common love not just for driving, but for going off the beaten path a bit.  Every time I suggested something different, she was up for it -- and a few times she thought of the best way to not be efficient in our route planning.  So I'm going to find a covered bridge for her if it means looping back into Ohio.

We saw an amusing van that Lily described as having antlers.  I was noticing the arm out the window holding something fabric and flapping it about.  We decided it had to be a baseball hat, likely drying the sweat out.  Good old Gutter Dan and his companion, whatshisname.  When we finally passed Gutter Dan and company, I took a look at the driver.  Turns out Dan's an older gentleman, and wasn't wearing a shirt.  Oh and had the window open.

It's been stupid hot on this trip so far and crazy humid as well.  High 80's or more, and just not comfortable.  And yet we see so many cars on and off the highway driving with the windows open.  I remember doing that in the 70's because Dad was too cheap to get an air conditioner in the orange (did you know it was international strikethrough day today?  Well it is now.) saddle tan 1976 Dodge Aspen.

But don't all cars come with air conditioning now?  I suppose not.  I'm thinking that might be my most bougie statement of the day.  But I can't imagine that makes for much of a comfortable ride, though it's better than no air conditioner and closed windows..

More hours and more Indiana.  They did have some kick ass windmills though.  They seemed much, much larger than the windmills we have back home.  See the corn, too?  So much corn.  Great, you've got corn.

But then Ohio happened -- and we got a picture of the welcome sign!  Want to know what Ohio looked like?  Indiana.  And corn.

We stopped at the rest area mentioned in the above picture.  Standard fare, pretty clean, nice picnic pavilion, and..  so much corn.

  I had a call with my therapist in the late afternoon so I was looking for a town with a park.  Settled on Wooster, Ohio.  It's actually got something like 4 exits, so it's of moderate size.  And Lily knocked it out of the park, so to speak, in finding me a park in which to have my call.  Huge park with an amazing view:  

Not a bad place to get your head shrunk!

and beautiful scenery, except many (like, MANY) of the trees had Lord Of The Rings scale spider web clumps in them.  The size of footballs, sure to be holding billions of scary monsters.

The rest of the park had wildflowers, and nice benches, and these amazing paths that smelled like ValleyFaire when it opened in the 1970's.  Can't recommend it enough.  Although I can't remember the name of the park, because it's in Wooster Ohio and you're never going to go there on purpose.

But something amazing happened when we got to Wooster.  Elevation changes!  Curves in roads!  Interesting things outside the car windows!  It changed everything.  Yes, we were tired, but this felt like we were getting somewhere.  I had to remind myself a number of times that we were still only in Ohio, but it felt much, much less like being in the Midwest and another place like home but with different graphics. 

Yet another side note:   Lily is so awesome at being the right amount of curious!  We would see something like a billboard with a "your ad here" message on it, and we'd both thought to wonder how much that would be.  So a full sized billboard is called a "bulletin" and it's 2-3k for four weeks.  A smaller one is called something else but I forgot, go google it.  But they're like $900 for four weeks.  No matter who was driving, the other one of us was always ready to do a quick search and learn the answer to our curiosities.  But not too much -- just enough to satisfy.

We also started to see Amish folk in great numbers.  Like there was an invisible line they weren't allowed to live west of - as evidenced by the fact that when I'm in Minnesota and Iowa, I might see one or two, but never too many in a single trip.  This was like a convention!  Horse poop on the side of all the roads, people in a wide variety of buggies, and even Amish people walking horseless on the side of the road.  I expect we'll see more in Pennsylvania, traversing covered bridges we hope.  But I've never ever seen one on a horse.  Do they not do that?  For Rumspringa do kids ride ponies at the fair?

We did continue to see beautiful skies and majestic clouds.  And hills!  So many hills!

At some point (again, I could look it up but don't want to.  Go figure our route and look at a map and suss out what I'm talking about - the name ended with " dam") we came upon a man-made lake, with huge towering hills around, and occasionally the road would jet across a section splitting the lakes apart.  I was reminded of the TV series Ozark.  You should watch it, but it's really dark so don't if you don't like that.  And by dark I mean scary, but also filmed so dark you have to watch it under a blanket in order to be able to see anything.  I kept thinking about all of the towns and homes and cemeteries and things like that who were flooded out to make the lake.  I felt bad for the poor "second nation" folks who were driven from their homeland - that they got by driving the first nation folks out.  It's still pretty eerie.

We could see deer in the hills, either in fields or edges of trees, but way high up in the hills.  It was very cool, but also fun to see them not just on the side of the road, dead or alive.

I had noticed this the night before when researching the route - but we were going to go through West Virginia!  (mountain momma, take me home) and that was going to bump our state count for the day up to four!  We were in WV for literally 5 minutes before popping into..

Pennsylvania!  And we got all three new states' signage recorded for posterity!

After a beautiful sunset that lasted for hours, it got dark and we found our way into Pittsburgh.  How the HELL did they live there before google maps?  It's up and down and sideways and crazy all over the place.  Even with the map, the instructions, and a line literally showing me where to go there were a bunch of times that I had to slow down just to see where the road might be.  Oh and I'm going to start a collection for more streetlights in Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas.  They have some, but none of them are anywhere near the curves, many of which are 90 and more degree turns.

So a good friend made a suggestion for hotels in Pittsburgh, and we were super jazzed about it.  But I didn't want to make a reservation last night, because I didn't know for sure that we would make it to Pittsburgh, and the reservations were non refundable.  So of course when we did the "Lily, make us a reservation 30 minutes before we walk in the door" trick that's worked so well for us the one time we've used it, they were sold out.  But she found a Crown something that was inexpensive, really kinda nice, and in a big box store and parking lot factory, so less fear someone would break into her car and steal all her stuff.  Not that they would want any of it.  No offense to her, but college kids who haven't even colleged yet don't have anything of value.  Except cash and checks from cards - and when we got done eating, she went to work and cranked out a ton of personalized thank you notes.  Better late than never.

When we checked into the hotel the clerk noted my surname deficiency, but also loved my Discover card - it's an image of an old cassette.  The clerk in Valpo commented on it as well.  We asked the Pittsclerk what the food options in the area were and he listed all of the boring chain restaurants you can find anywhere.  We ended up deciding to have someone deliver some Arby's, but that was complicated so we just drive to the drive-through window and brought some back to the hotel.  It was gone within minutes.  When we were in Baltimore checking out colleges last year we had no option for food except delivery, so we had Subway meatball sandwiches delivered.  It was the most expensive Subway order of my life, but at 2 in the morning they were so good!

Tomorrow is a shorter driving day, and we intend to make it a much longer drive than it needs to be.  Covered bridges, actual mountains, Amish, etc.  Can't wait -- but can't keep my eyes open anymore.  It's a good kind of tired.  Not even going to go back and fix the typos.