It seemed like such a good idea at the time. When Greg Bossler, our new senior associate editor, announced that he was planning to travel from our Cincinnati office to the Thespian Festival in Nebraska by car, I quickly signed on to ride shotgun. Road trip! A chance to see the real America. A solidarity of experience with all those Thespians riding across the country in yellow buses. Plus, Greg offered to use the time to give me a college-level introduction to electronic music from his 15,000-track iPod.
It had been many years since I had undertaken a long car trip. I had forgotten so much.
One of the things I had forgotten was how radically the interstate highway system has remodeled the American travel landscape. Gone are the quirky roadside attractions that used to punctuate a drive. The World's Largest Ball of String may still be out there, but you can't see it from the interstate. The result has been to make the nation’s heartland kind of boring.
But that's how you do it: I-74 to Champaign-Urbana, 55 down to 72 at Springfield, I-72 across the rest of Illinois to the Mississippi River at Hannibal, US 36 across Missouri to St. Joe, and then north on I-29. Cross the Missouri River on Nebraska Rt. 2, and Bob's your uncle.
I have to say the food was a little bit disappointing, too. We had considered trying to organize the trip so we could take all of our nourishment at Bob Evans Restaurants--Greg likes the hearty biscuit and sausage gravy breakfast, chicken-fried steak for me--but that proved to be impractical. At our first non-Bob food stop, a place called Joe's Diner near Hannibal, we innocently asked our server, a young woman who would have a good shot at being cast as Becky Thatcher, what on the menu was good.
She looked a little bit perplexed by the question. Clearly it was based on a flawed premise.
"I don't hardly ever eat the food here," she finally said. "Just the sides sometimes, and that's only if I'm really hungry." Then she said a couple of other things that did not seem to be consistent with her duty to the Joe's Diner brand promise.
Our first night on the road we stayed with Greg's in-laws Al and June, a delightful retired couple who live in the Missouri countryside and whose generous hospitality more than made up for our culinary experience at Joe's. Here's how we knew we were out in the country:
1. Dirt road.
2. Zero bars of Verizon.
3. Actual stars in the sky.
4. Lots of talk about big snakes.
Our second day on the road was a few hundred miles shorter than the first, but it didn’t seem like it. Who knew Missouri was so wide? All those soybeans, all those drum machines.
The Thespian Festival itself was a blur. We worked real hard, had a lot of fun, and didn’t sleep much. (If you’d like more detail than that, check out our Tumblr posts.) In memory, though, it now seems like a brief pit stop between two really long car rides.
We took the northern route on the way home, and we did finally encounter one roadside attraction, adapted for the twenty-first century: Iowa 80, a.k.a. The World’s Largest Truckstop, a vast emporium that contains within its girth not just the usual truck stop amenities, but also a dentist’s office, a chiropractor, and a public library. Of course we stopped. By that time, seasoned travelers, we knew better than to ask the staff about the food.