Went through Cheyenne, and I do mean *through*. I proceded through the town desperately seeking a form of drive-up/through sustenance, which meant I was stuck going through town, which I expected to be all pretty and cowboy old westy and instead it looked like someone threw snow on Del Paso Heights. Sigh. I DID narrowly avoid hitting a bus by skidding right through a red light though. I do love ice. But good news!! I secured us a Hardee's, which they cruelly deprive us of in California, and stuck some biscuits and gravy on the inside of my arteries. Ummy num num! Oh Hardee's, I'm naming my first heart attack after you.
Got out of Wyoming and into Nebraska... my first thought was that Nebraska and I were NOT going to get along well. Desolate, ugly, frozen, an endless unpunctuated terrain of filthy slush kicked onto my windshield by trucks and treacherous icy roads. Fun. You all should see my car. It used to be white.
However, in part two of Nebraska, the disgusting road smegma gave way to an icy wonderland of glistening trees. Okay, Nebraska, you grew on me:
I mean, that's just flipping cool. And then for these Robert Frost sorts of images:
As well as:
Good show, Nebraska. Nice work.
Then it was winding on I-29 through the dark in an attempt to find our next route. This had us bouncing back and forth between Iowa and Missouri for some time. I got next to no impression of Iowa other than a decided "red state" feeling at one gas station that had a selection of bumper stickers that made me realize it was time to haul my left coast liberal little butt on out of there quietly.
Missouri is/was nice enough, though it's an interesting blend... How to sum it up?
Come to Missouri! Bibles, bitches, and booze!
There's a strange sort of dichotomy in Missouri. It's like the buckle of the Bible Belt slammed into West Hollywood. What's the motto? A church across from every porn shop or a porn shop across from every church? On the one hand, all the little kitch shops are full of Bible verses, dolls of women in modest clothing... the landscape is pretty with little farmhouses that are spaced here and there surrounded by fields (and see them soon folks, since i'm sure by next year, there'll be a walmart there)... yet the porn shops! They're everywhere! And they heavily advertise! They have one place called "Passions" that from the 50 miles of billboards leading up to it, I expected to be a sort of porn mecca... golden phallus rising proudly to the skies above, etc, but by the time we finally crossed it, it's more of the sagging shack vein of ALL the other porn shops in Missouri, and there are a buttload of them, let me tell you!
Even the Yellowtail Chardonnay poster had to get racy to be approved. Here's a wine normally associated with kangaroos, but in Missouri, the billboard had to have a barely dressed mermaid with, you guessed it, a yellow tail. They don't even HAVE mermaids in Australia. They aren't venomous enough.
Nice people though. I stayed in a motel 6 (with no wi fi! Horror!) in St. Joseph and all the locals are just sunshine and buttercups, unlike the gawking hill people in Nevada. Holy crap people, they're just reindeer slippers. Close your mouths.
And today, I sit in a Flying J, as mentioned before, ensconsing myself in bytes. AHHHHH... so good. Onward to St. Louis!
2 comments:
BODACIOUS!
We moved from NC (Burlington) to NW Iowa. It's such a major culture shock... almost no trees, way to compliant people, corn fields out the wahoo... Our town doesn't even number 700 people while back home it was near 200,000. Heh.
You didn't miss much in Iowa. It's dull and mostly farmland. My blue ass sticks out like a sore thumb here.
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