Wednesday September 27th

In the morning on my way out of the park I passed a lovely field of flowers. It was well after nine by the time I got going, avoiding driving into the sun again.

I stopped at a rest stop after a couple of hours, then got to the mighty Mississippi River. I had turned off the highway on an exit promising fuel, and drove for some time in the direction the sign said. In the end I checked Google Maps, and the service station was coming up, but it was about 5km off the highway! I stopped at a parking lot along the river afterwards and had a look.

The river divided Iowa from Illionis, and I drove back to the main highway and crossed over the river, then had lunch in a little park on the Illinois side, Illiniwek Forest Preserve.

It was another lovely day, and I ate at a picnic table near the river. There was a toilet block there, with a sign on the door showing a handgun with a cross through it. I don’t know why someone would bring a gun into a toilet! There were immensely long barges being pushed along the river by boats. There looked strange, being so long and narrow, it was quite a sight. The river has a lot of barge traffic, and also the Great Lakes, popular water freight routes.

I was to stay with my cousin Melissa the next couple of nights, and I found out she finished teaching around 3.30 or 4, so I aimed to get to her place by then. I had considered going to a couple of state parks along this route, but it was around 1.30 by the time I’d had lunch, and there were still two and a half hours of driving to go, so I skipped them to get as much time as I could with her and her husband. I got to visit one of the parks when I was with them on the way back a few weeks later. The coutryside, though sometimes a little more hilly, still had a lot of corn fields with farm houses here and there.

Melissa lived on the outskirts of Chicago, to the south-west. Chicago itself is on the west side of one of the immense Great Lakes, Lake Michigan. There are toll roads in a lot of states, and I had managed to avoid most of them, except for a little in California, but through the Chicago area there were quite a few. All the eastern states used the same network for toll roads, so you could get a transponder that would work in a lot of states. I was thinking of trying to buy one, but Melissa had offered to loan me one of their transponders that they weren’t using, which would automatically charge me when I went on toll roads, and I could settle up when I came back again later.

I hadn’t got the transponder yet though, so to save trouble with trying to pay for things later, I found a route which didn’t go along toll roads. It was fairly busy as I came along the road where they lived, though traffic was flowing well. They were on a fairly major road, only two lanes, but quite a bit of traffic. I spotted their driveway just too late as I was driving along, and then was trying to work out what to do, with someone behind tooting me. I exited onto an off-ramp, and Google Maps guided me through some small streets around again, and this time I spotted the driveway in time!

It was so nice to meet Melissa after such along time, and Gurp for the first time. We had a nice evening chatting, and I met their cat Tango, who was a rescue cat and very timid.

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