Quick note: this email has been sitting in my pad for over two weeks. For a country that was instrumental in the formation of the internet it hasn’t got very good access to it. I shall type till my hands become crippled with RSI.
The trip was going swimmingly at this point. It was a flat and straight road with warm air and good tunes on the stereo. We even met some sensible Americans that offered to cook us a Cajun meal and share their 50 bottle collection of scotch. This is close to my idea of a perfect evening so it made the next chain of events even harder to bear.
We met ‘the Scotch couple’ in a town called Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln is a college town which halves in size when school and the football aren’t on. We were there to deliver the car to nearby Omaha but decided to stay in Lincoln to eat up some time and recover from driving 1400 miles in three days. The day before we had passed through the border separating Missouri and Kansas, the state below Nebraska. This would have been as unremarkable as the borders between all the other mid-western states except for the fact that the instant we crossed the border the roadside fast food restaurants disappeared from the highway and it was pristine cornfields for as far as the eye could see. I would like to say that all the billboards disappeared as well but there were still a few pro-life ones popping up, giving the impression that Kansas was even more conservative than the rest of the places we had just visited – no easy feat.
It was a short drive north into Nebraska which, boringly and unsurprisingly, featured a lot of fields. The town of Lincoln was near deserted as we drove through it but we just wanted to get to the hostel and rest for a couple of days. The hostel was located amidst the sorority lodgings, underneath the chapel. As you know, religious institutions make my skin itch after a prolonged exposure, so it wasn’t looking good. Thankfully we were housed in a massive ramshackle room with a ping pong table, pool table and an old stereo with eclectic LP’s like the Goldfinger soundtrack and The Clash with ‘London Calling’. The pool cues were so sticky that I rubbed the skin off my hand and the ping pong game made my thighs ache for days.
We were feeling a lot more relaxed until Tim contacted the owner of the vehicle we were delivering. Her name was Funke (pronounced fun-kay). She said that she was in Med school all day on the day that we were supposed to be delivering the car but being the nice guys we are, and wanting to avoid spending a whole day in Omaha, we offered to have the car there by 7 am.
Due to a mix-up involving multiple street names we ended up being late and were informed that Funke had left the house. By this stage Tim and I just wanted to take a nap but instead we drove the car to the hospital and enjoyed a breakfast in the cafeteria. After breakfast we got the bad news that a car we had been expecting from Omaha to Phoenix was non-existent. To put this news in context people have been known to commit suicide rather than spend 24 hours in Omaha. It is a truly atrocious city with nothing to recommend it and plenty to make you want to leave. It was a demoralising moment and after the early start, a day that had just begun felt like it should have ended already. Eventually the car was delivered and we washed our hands of the whole ordeal. There was a bus leaving to Chicago in 20 minutes and at that point in time a 10 hour bus journey seemed like heaven.
Our trip from Omaha to Chicago featured Bob the bus driver. Bob had an Illinois twang and he jazzed up the usual bus commentary with his very own comedy routine:
– If you leave anything on the bus make sure it’s something I can take to the pawn shop.
– My name’s easy to remember. It’s spelt the same forwards as it is backwards. B-O-B.
The standard didn’t improve much from there but just as I was writing Bob off as a lost cause he proved his worth. About eight hours into the trip we hit a huge storm. Lightning was touching down on either side of the bus and as I edged away from all metal objects the rain flooded down, cutting visibility to about 10 feet. It was at this point that I noticed that US highways have no reflective road markings and as we passed cars that had pulled over to the side of the road I ceased joking about Bob and prayed to god that he was a career bus driver and not a failed comic. He proved his worth in the end by safely getting us to the big smoke and I for one was glad that he hadn’t given up his day job.
Chicago has a gleaming skyline which competes admirably with New York but doesn’t quite have the legs. It’s perched on Lake Wisconsin which is the biggest lake I have ever seen. It’s like an inland sea with the waters stretching to the horizon. Chicago feels like the kind of place New York was before they discovered community spirit. There are a lot of beggars, and people on the train look like they’re a twitch away from going postal.
Dave out.
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