09 December 2003 15:19
traveling: homeward bound, may '03so after i finished watching movies with schooby (it was a good run, we watched T1 and T2 in anticipation of T3's release this summer. then we watched the truth about charlie along with the original.. that was an interesting comparison. speaking of watching recent releases along with their origianals, i wouldn't recommend watching the original "italian job." a useless movie in the first place, it's even worse when set beside the '03 italian job.
i decided to take a lazy route home.. the sooner i got home the sooner i'd have to go back to work, you know, motivation wasn't real high. in actuallity, though i added miles and time to the trip, i was still home in the usual two days. having not the time nor the recources at hand—i only did have two days to work with (that's about as long as i can go without a decent night's sleep)— i had to skip the extended tour of the ozarks. i've managed to drive through them four or five times, but always at night.. wha'ts up with that? instead i expedited my leg to little rock, that put me roughly a third of the way home. from there i headed north up 167. you are going to have to pardon me if i get the wrong numbers, i don't have an atlas with me. this took me into southeast MO, a region i hadn't been before. that's what this route was calculated to accomplish.
i saw a Lot of ag planes. they weren't spraying chemicals, most of them were spreading seed or fertilizer, it looked pretty cool. but i saw six of them in one short strecth of time. it's always cool, seeing their airfields. there are few of them along US70 in AR, which i sometimes take to get off I40, gleaming AgCats in open hangers, grass or asphalt strip heading off into the surrounding corn. they often have some very nice facilities, must make a pretty penny off the farmers. SE MO had a lot of what was probably rice fields, flood irrigated. they would be crossed by these long wavy terraces, then along the edge of the field each terrace would have a saddle in it that water could cross, usually covered by a bright orange plastic. approaching the Mississippi, the land became even lower.. the road I was on was situated on top of a dike for about 8 miles at one point.
crossing the river was interesting.. the bridge was longish, tallish, and not narrowish. no, it was just plain down narrow. tractor trailers were crossing it too. cross that bridge and you're in illinois (this was on US62 i think). you can turn east to cross the next bridge into KY, or you can go north and enter the town of Cairo, Illinois. This is the cairo of huckleberry finn fame, where the ohio meets the mississippi at the very southern tip of illinois. i found it to be an entirely hot, humid, buggy, miserable sort of place.. but then i never really liked illinois to begin with. but i was in search of a post office.. they were scarce, being saturday, but i found a drop box. i parked illegally, even with a cop sitting across the street, hopped out barefooted (which i understand you're not supposed to drive barefoot.. whatever), dropped my mail and left. mom's a stamp collector.. i think i ended up sending eight or nine post cards home over the course of a day and a half. then i hightailed it over into kentucky, wehre things immediately looked better. on the east side of the river was kinda swampy though, the road was about a foot above water line, two lanes through the swamp. i'm not a swamp person either. eya.
i got on interstate for a little at paducah, then turned off for the land between the lakes. southwest ky has a large state park situated between and around a two fingered lake. there's a public use airport at the north end, which i had intended to stop at on a cross country back in the fall, but that had fallen through, so i went to see what it looked like fromt he ground. it didn't look like much, i'm not sure if the field is even attended. i found that, but then i wanted to drive down through the park. however, through a deficit of attention and trying to navigate from a statemap, i ended up driving down the west side. which was okay, i just never saw anything very interesting. i did find a post office to maile another post card from, but that was it. i rounded the south end of the lake and laid in a course eastbound.
1209033.1138.1219
15:19 email me permalink / commentary (0)
