[Leica] The Adventures of Eric the Red, part 8

[Martin Howard <howard.390@osu.edu>]

Tuesday morning, 7 am.  I told the tire guys my story, picked out some
decent looking Goodyear tires, asked they put the Michelin spare back in
the boot, was told that it would take twenty minutes, got a cup of coffee,
bought a lug-nut tire wrench, enrolled in the American Automobile
Association as a complete and total guarantee against anything else
happening on this trip, and paid my $135 for the tires and labour.

They call New Jersey the Garden State, but I thought that the description
would have fitted Iowa perfectly.  Everything looked like it was neatly
trimmed only last week, immaculately in order, perfectly in place.  I-29
takes you south of Sioux City towards Omaha on the Nebraska side of the
border, then you shoot across I-680 to I-80, which takes you pretty much in
a straight line across the bottom third of the state.  Des Moines, Iowa
City, and Davenport were all just names on the road to Illinois.

I had a headwind almost all the way across Iowa, which meant the milage
dropped like stone.  I also discovered that handling a car the size of the
Lincoln, with American suspension, in high wind, was a challenge.
Basically, it means keeping the car under 60 mph.  Above this is starts
lurching too much, while at 55 mph, it'll cut through anything.  Milage was
another consideration.  At a nice and steady 55 mph, I could get close to
20 mpg (about 1.2L/10km).  Step on it and do the Montana state speed limit
of 75 mph, and this drops drastically to 15 mpg (1.6L/10km), while city
driving with lots of red lights and an enthusiastic right foot leaves you
looking at 10 mph (2.4L/10km).  Good job the petrol price is a quarter of
that in Sweden.  Nevertheless, the headwind across Iowa was killing me and
I was looking at 15-16 mpg over 300 miles.

In Davenport on the eastern border of Iowa, the plan was to circle the city
southward, get onto Interstate 74 and head down through Illinois, past
Peoria, Bloomington, Champaign-Urbana, and Danville, to pick up Interstate
74 to Indiana.  Take a look at a relatively detailed city map of any US
city circled by the interstate system, and you will instantly recognize
that it bears a striking resemblance to a coloured drawing of a bowl of
spaghetti.  Davenport is no exception.  What looks simple enough on the
state map of Iowa in the Rand McNally Millenium Edition 2000 Road Atlas is,
in reality, an absolute mess of on-ramps and off-ramps, of lane changes,
construction work, and impatient city-bound traffic.  In addition to this,
some cities will have the road numbers on the direction signs, and others
will have the names of the nearest of largest cities that that road leads
to.  I knew, while driving around Davenport in the late afternoon, that I
wanted Interstate 74, but I didn't know that I should have been looking for
the turn-off towards Rock Island and Molina.  So, I ended up crossing the
Mississippi twice, and eventually found myself on I-80 heading east.

The other truth about the US interstate system is that once you've
positively identified that you're going in the wrong direction along the
wrong road, there will be no turn-off for the next twenty miles.  I-80 East
was no exception.  Finally, I got to a rest-stop, where I had the first
change to pull out my map and figure out where I was.  As it turned out,
I-80 East heads straight for Chicago (something I knew from the signs and a
city whose traffic I'd rather avoid, if possible, apart from it being way
too far north of where I wanted to be), but about half-way there, you can
turn onto I-39 and head straight south for Bloomington, allowing me to link
up with I-74 as I had previously planned.  Said and done.

Dusk fell and I continued.  Bloomington, Champaign-Urbana, and Danville
flashed past my windscreen and I entered Indiana.  Names like Fountain,
Montgomery and Hendricks County zipped by as I headed for Indianapolis.  I
was going to take the ring-road anti-clockwise around the city, but I-70
linked up with I-74 a short distance along the ring-road and I took this.
I-70 was a familiar name.  I know it well, it runs less than five miles
south of my home in Columbus.  Getting onto I-70 was like being three steps
from my front door.  By now I'd been driving two hours, sleeping twenty
minutes, for the past 12 hours at least and had no idea of what time of day
it was.  I knew that I could get home sometime on the Wednesday morning
instead of the evening if I kept this up, which was only about four or five
hours of driving away.  Indianapolis was littered with construction work
zones with reduced speed limits.  I was only doing 55-60 mph in any case,
but by now my only road companions were 18-wheeled trucks.

Truckers own the road.  It's their place of work.  From what I can tell of
how truckers drive at night, they feel that anything going slower than them
has reliquished its right to existance.  Now, the state law may be that
trucks can only do 55 mph while cars can do 65 mph, but you'd be hard
pressed to find any truck driver doing less than 70 mph around Indianapolis
at one in the morning.  Whenever we'd his a single-lane construction zone
with a 55 mph speed limit, I'd have a long line of trucks behind me,
desperate to get past, cursing, praying, hoping that the single-lane limit
would end so they could pass me with a roar from their diesel engines.

At one point, we entered a single-lane, 55 mph zone with no shoulder and
concrete barricades on either side of the lane.  It caught me by surprise
and suddenly I was getting stroboscopic flashes from the headlights being
reflected of the white concrete.  I was going at 50 mph with concrete
barricades about 3" (15 cm) from either side of the car.

It was like the end sequence to Star
Wars, where Luke Skywalker has to shoot two rockets down a Death Star waste
recepticle (or something like that).  The spirit of Alec Guinness was
echoing in my head:
   "Use the force, Luke.  Use the force."

It was clear I needed proper rest.  I pulled over into a the parking lot of
a gas station and tried to go to sleep.  The problem was that while my mind
may have needed rest, it was so wired on caffeine and powerbars that
fireworks were going off inside my head.  And my body certainly didn't need
rest: it had been doing nothing at all for the past three and a half days.
If anything, it needed exercise.  And the humid night didn't help.  With no
temperature guage functioning and a potential leak in the engine cooling
system, I hadn't dared to use the airconditioner.  While moving, it wasn't
much of a problem, since the breeze cooled you off, but sitting still in a
parking lot in the dead of the night, with high temperature and high
humidity, there was no escape.

So, I jogged on the spot.  I did push-ups.  I stretched.  I did the aerobic
exercises I could remember from the jiu-jitsu practice a few years back in
Linkoping.  I did this for about an hour until I was drenched and couldn't
think or stand any more, then slumped into the passenger seat, set the
alarm for three hours, and slept like a baby.

All in all, it was not the smartest of moves, but it was useful
experience.  I'd learnt to read the warning signs, without getting into any
harm.  I woke rested and refreshed at dawn and drove into Ohio.  Past
Dayton, past Springfield, onto Columbus.  Through the morning traffic, off
I-70, up Niel Avenue, take a left onto Third St., a right onto Northwest
Boulevard, a right onto Independence Rd, a left into the parking lot.

I was home.


EPILOGUE

The question I get alot is, "would you do it again?"  Absolutely.  In the
bat of an eyelid.  But, I wouldn't do it the same way.  Some things I'd do
differently are:

  * A car that I know better than one which is 23 years old and has
    spent the twelve months up to four days before departure parked
    on an island and unused.

  * Have a travel companion.  Someone to talk to, someone to share
    the experience with, and someone to do half the damn driving.

  * More time.  Given my time table and the unknown state of the
    car, I had virtually no time to stop in interesting places.  I
    would have loved to see so many places along this trip, but
    there was just no time.

But that's pretty much it.  There are two other cross-US trips I'd love to
do, one taking the middle route through Kansas, Colorado, and Utah, and the
other taking the southern route.  With any luck, a friend of mine will be
coming over next spring and we'll do the trip from Columbus, down to
Georgia, across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, northern Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.

And, knowing me, we'll probably scoot up to Vancouver just for the day ;)


                http://www.ida.liu.se/~marho/eric/etr.jpg

M.

- -- 
Martin Howard              | There's a culture here which dictates that
Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU| anyone who walks more than a few paces must
email: howard.390@osu.edu  | either be too poor to own [a car], clinically
www: http://mvhoward.i.am/ | insane, or British.    -- David Willis, BBCWS
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