Day Three: Mentor, Ohio to Terre Haute, Indiana. 411 miles, according to Google.

The day started inauspiciously, with thunder and lightning and TV news suggesting more to come. But except for a brief flash of lightning just as we left our motel, we had mostly fair weather, and manageable traffic. But lots of it. Every semitrailer rig in America seemed eager to share the road with us, all at once.  Oh, yeah -- and 100 degree heat.

Ohio and Indiana highways seem to be all under construction (a lot of  Obama stimulus money at work, but Republican Governors Kasich and Daniels are not like to give him credit). Even when there were six or even eight lane sections of road, only two lanes were usually open in either direction, and sometimes only one. But still it all whizzed along in a nerve-wracking way.  Ohio's speed limit is 65; Indiana's is 70, and everyone adds ten mph to it. Somehow we all hurtled along bumper to bumper without mishap.

There are rest stops every 60 miles or so, but they are sparsely equipped. Indiana's are mostly barren deserts, without shade or anywhere to sit outside, assuming anyone would want to in the 100-degree heat. I remarked on this to the attendant in one of the particularly sterile Indiana rest stops, where newly planted trees plunked down without much of a plan didn't look like they had much of a future, and the dominant feature was acres of cement.  She was poetic in her reply (I suspect few travelers ever talk to her in the course of a day, let alone ask her about the aesthetics of her domain). She described how it had all looked until a year ago -- seemingly an Eden, with great leafy mature trees shading the modest buildings, acres of green lawn and meadow, picnic tables and benches set away from the highway -- and then the bulldozers came to "improve" it.   


And on either side of the highway, mile after mile of cornfields, with here and there an abandoned barn, perhaps once the heart of a small farmstead gobbled up by an agribusiness giant. No longer needed and too much trouble to dismantle, the barns slowly and gracefully disintegrate, picturesque reminders of a bygone era for a while longer before returning to the soil. 


Tomorrow: Illinois and Missouri. Maybe on into Oklahoma, but we are getting ahead of ourselves, as we aren't expected in Santa Fe until the 7th. So maybe we'll dawdle a bit, do some "blue highways" driving, and give ourselves a more restful day. 

****

Question for Blogger users: if you are seeing some of these posts as I do, where some of the text is in black on white strips (sort of like an old telegram), instead of on the usual beige background, do you know how to fix it? I can't figure it out or get any good answers from Blogger's help section.