Quest of the Phoenix 2017 (10)

I rose via alarm (Did I mention that I brought my own alarm clock?) at about 7:15. I showered almost immediately so that I could grab breakfast (which was minimal but adequate) without stinking too badly and returned to my room to study my route for the day yet again. At some point someone knocked on the door and a child’s voice said, “Hi.”

I figured another guest’s kid had gotten loose and was playing around so I said “Hi” back, not quite sure how to respond. Then the door opened.

“Uh, excuse me,” I said, turning towards the door, though the housekeeping lady who had opened it (?) was already apologizing and closing it. I guess she had brought her child with her to work? Yet another of the uncanny things that happen when you stay at a bunch of hotels.

By 9:30, I was checked out and prepared to leave. Before departing Overland Park, I drove just slightly down the road to a Hardee’s restaurant for second breakfast. They have a sandwich consisting of a fried, breaded pork chop on a biscuit with white gravy. That is all.

After this indulgence I returned to the freeway, which circled weirdly around Kansas City in such a way that it was difficult to tell when I was or was not in the actual city, though in any event it took quite a long time to get clear of the obvious urban-area traffic, which wasn’t up to the psychotic standards of the Far West (or, for that matter, New York or New Jersey) but nevertheless demanded at least, like, 90% of my attention. I hate it when “driving” is the main thing I end up doing while driving. After awhile the city-congestion fell away and the freeway grew peaceful for a short jaunt to the north before I would leave it and head east. Based on the generalized greenness, early spring flowers, and fairly ample creeks and rivers, it was safe to say that, upon crossing into Missouri, I was now back in the MOIST part of the country.

I got on Highway 36, which runs straight east across pretty much the entirety of Missouri in the northern part of said state, listening to a “Best of Mindless Self Indulgence” mix I made long enough ago that I had a particularly good excuse for not including anything from after 2005 on it (i.e. because I made it in 2005, or maybe 2006), as well as for including material from Jimmy Urine’s weird solo-demo days prior to the formation of MSI proper, which is where some of “their” best songs may be found, anyway. Meanwhile, Missouri became farmy, like the last thousand miles or so I’d crossed, though also woodsy where not specifically farmy. By now I had direct experience in discerning “farmland that would be a prairie if left to its own devices” from “farmland that would be a forest.” They’re different.

Missouri actually has some pretty serious hills. Not craggy-like as in Appalachia or parts of the West, but big, rolling, up-and-down hills that exceed the mere undulation of Iowa to the north. Near Chillicothe I stopped to pee at the mandatory McDonald’s, though this time I actually did not get coffee. The weather was cooler than it had been yesterday in the center of the country, but not quite chilly; cool, clear, sunny, and breezy.

After a bit more driving down 36 (which BTW resembled a state highway in the West in that it had a speed limit of 65, huzzah), I stopped for gas in the town of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, near the Illinois border. I had to drive a little ways through surprisingly heavy traffic before reaching the gas station, which belonged to a franchise I’d never heard of nor seen anywhere else. Of course I also took a leak. Turning left onto the aforementioned surprisingly-busy road was a dismal prospect, but I managed to do so EVENTUALLY.

Around this time, as I approached the state line, Highway 36 became Freeway 72. I was now listening to an ancient Cradle of Filth mix that a friend made for me back in like 2003 when I was just getting into metal. Traffic picked up a bit as I crossed the Mississippi River once more, though this time it wasn’t grey and rainy so I could see and appreciate it a bit more. It’s rather slow-moving, but nevertheless, it is kind of a big deal as rivers go.

To my surprise, southern Illinois actually had some small rocky cliffs and stuff like that. Otherwise however it was mostly just flat or gently-rolling farmland interspersed with thickets of trees. Clearly I was back in the Great Lakes region, and almost home, sort of. (I had originally intended to drive from Kansas City all the way back to home-home on Day 10, but Google Maps marked that as an 12-hour drive. So, considering that their supposed 11-hour drives had ended up being more like 13, it’s likely I made the right choice in inserting one extra hotel room into the trip towards the end there.)

At Springfield, Illinois, located in the approximate center of the state and also its capital, I exited on the outskirts of town to find another of the restaurants that had served the Chicago Dogs back in Maricopa. Last night I’d actually browsed their corporate website trying to find locations. Springfield was as far northeast as they went, sadly. I had to drive through at least a mile or so of semi-developed countryside and exurb-type areas to find the place, and then its driveway was weirdly hidden by another part of the same intersection (or something?) so I had to go back and forth a bit to actually enter. This time I went in on foot, since I also needed to pee yet again. The place has a bit of a “retro” vibe, and since they cook everything fresh, it took a little while to receive my food, but it was worth it. This time I tried one of their burgers (very good) and had another Chicago Dog to go with it, since I was in Illinois now anyway.

Springfield is also where I turned north(east), so after lunch I switched freeways again. Northeast I drove, through areas about which I cannot remember anything in particular and about which I jotted down nothing in my notebook, so they must have been pretty boring. I was now listening first to a Black Sabbath mix, and then to my favorite bits-and-pieces of various Hammer of Retribution podcasts as I stopped at a rest area and then approached Joliet, where my hotel lay. Joliet is also, almost exactly, the point at which my two paths diverged back on Day 1, with me taking the more northerly route due-west on the way There, and now completing my more southerly Back route. Thus, tomorrow, Day 11, would be the only part of the Boring Return Journey in which I was actually retracing my steps.

I got on I-80 East and quickly exited for Joliet, managing to find my hotel quickly despite the fact that I had to navigate one of those horrid and insidious “entrexits” right beforehand. We have some of those on the freeways in Michigan as well (the West, despite its other traffic issues, seemed free of them): those awful pieces of crap where the entrance ramp for 46A flows DIRECTLY into the exit ramp for 46B, that sort of thing. So if a car is entering the freeway on 46A and you need to exit on 46B, you basically have to cut him off just as he’s trying to accelerate-and-merge, or else miss your exit. Which of course is exactly what happened in my case, though everything was fine. Who thought to design ramps like this? Perhaps one day I’ll meet him in a dark alley.

This hotel, another chain, was fairly “basic” though it did do a halfway decent job of putting on a glitzy facade. It was also HUGE, spread across like five or six different buildings’ worth of rooms, and it took me awhile to find my own after the polite and professional black lady at the counter got me checked in. The day had grown grey, cool, and humid. Definitely not too far from home now.

My room was small but quite nice. I ended up watching several episodes of South Park (a couple I hadn’t seen, a couple golden oldies) and part of a documentary about the horrors experienced by U.S. troops even during their relatively brief participation in World War One. Partially spurred on by my Mom texting me to ask about same, I had mixed feelings on returning home tomorrow. It would be nice to have access to all my stuff, and to not have to spend all day driving and worrying about driving; but on the other hand I would be back to the same old crap and the adventure will have ended, blah blah blah.

Sadly, that vast and influential organization, Assholes of America (AoA), was holding a convention at my hotel tonight, and their ceaseless racket meant I couldn’t get to sleep till around 1 AM. Someone, somewhere, should really start a motel chain that actively enforces a CURFEW at 11.