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DAY 25 – Wednesday, April 7 (34 weeks pregnant)
START: Blue Earth, MN
END: Benton Harbor, MI
MILEAGE: 563 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Interstate Driving, Mustard’s Last Stand

We slept in late today, not even stirring until at least nine-thirty.  We’d gotten pretty cranky at each other toward the end of yesterday’s marathon drive, so we made up this morning by drawing a little heart in our road journal next to the words “Blue Earth”.  We packed up the car just before the last official check out time of eleven o’clock, grabbed some free continental breakfast in the hotel lobby right before they took it all away, then drove down the road to get a picture in front of that Jolly Green Giant statue, which looked much less freaky in the daylight.  After that we got on the road and, for the first time all trip, had no scheduled stops to break up our day.  Our only concrete plan was just to “go as far as humanly possible.” 

Any long day of driving is hard and daunting no matter what the situation.  But it becomes downright discouraging after several fun but exhausting weeks on the road, all the while knowing it’s about to end in a couple of days.  We only had two more official stops to make in our last twelve hundred miles; a museum and a friend’s house.  Other than that, all we were really doing was just driving home.  It wasn’t easy working up the motivation to rack up miles under that mindset.  So Lauren and I did everything we could to keep our spirits and energy high for the duration of this day.  We finally managed to find some new comedy CD’s at the gas station in Blue Earth – as well as another journal since we were about to fill our second one.  We blew through the CD’s in the first two hours, after which Lauren read several of the most recent entries out loud from our journal.  She’d already read them to me, but we were grasping at anything that would burn minutes off our tedium.  I switched the radio over to the AM dial in an act of desperation, searching for some kind of political talk that might incite anything resembling a concrete thought to rouse my weary brain.  After that, in an act of dire desperation, I asked Lauren to read out loud from the magazines we’d acquired over the course of the trip.

This turned out to be a great idea.  We had several genres to choose from – entertainment, current events, pregnancy, parenting – and Lauren switched between them to keep it interesting.  There were some articles that made us say, “Huh, interesting.  Okay next.”  There were others that made us laugh and poke fun – usually the entertainment blurbs and anything involving John Kerry’s run for president.  But the best were the ones, usually in the parenting and pregnancy magazines, that triggered some kind of conversation that would last anywhere from several minutes to as long as an hour before prompting Lauren to start reading again.  In between topics I would dial around on the radio, always cranking it up whenever I heard “Redneck Woman”.  We both knew all the lyrics by the end of the day, and singing along would boost my adrenaline, giving me enough oomph for the next hundred or so miles before the song came on again. 

I can look back on every road trip I have ever taken and identify each one by a particular “theme song” – generally a new song that was playing more or less non-stop on radio stations everywhere I went.  My graduation trip from L.A. to Boston – and the long stretches of open country and farmland I saw for the first time alongside Interstate 40 – will always be called to mind whenever I hear “Tonight the Heartache’s On Me” by the Dixie Chicks.  I’ll always remember singing the song “All Star” by Smashmouth at the Grand Canyon while shooting the road trip movie, and how everyone else in the core cast and crew started singing it too, turning it into our unofficial anthem.  I’ll never forget how appropriate the song “Born to Fly” by Sara Evans felt as I pulled up my roots and left my L.A. comfort zone forever in pursuit of something new back east.  And now, I don’t think I’ll ever forget how many long and weary miles, and how many amazing and wonderful destinations Gretchen Wilson saw us through with “Redneck Woman.”  It’s weird, but I can still picture the exact underpass we were driving through in Nashville at the very instant I heard that song for the first time.  “Redneck Woman”, and all those others, have been emblazoned on my brain, representing forever the respective road trips when they came into my life.

The singing, the reading, the comedy and the lunchtime scouring of (of all places) Mauston, Wisconsin in search of a restaurant that would satisfy a sudden and inexplicable craving for Chinese food, carried us all the way to the northern outskirts of Chicago just in time for rush hour traffic.  We decided to stop for dinner in the suburb of Evanston, home of Northwestern University, at a place called Mustard’s Last Stand – yet another tip from the book, ROADFOOD.

Everybody knows that Chicago is famous for its Chicago-style pizza.  I had no clue that it is apparently famous for another all-American staple: hot dogs.  Vienna-brand all-beef hot dogs (known as “red hots” around these parts) served on a poppy seed bun and topped with just about every condiment known to man… except ketchup.  In Chi-town, ketchup is intended for french fry use only.  Asking for it on a hot dog is akin to adding Sweet-n-Low to an expensive glass of red wine.  Fortunately ROADFOOD had given us that critical bit of info ahead of time, so we didn’t embarrass ourselves.  But that didn’t stop me from feeling uneasy about screwing it up the instant I approached the counter at Mustard’s Last Stand.  They offered condiments I’d never even considered on a hot dog: pickles, tomato slices, celery salt, hot peppers.  I didn’t know what to ask for and what to leave off.  I was worried I’d ask for two condiments that didn’t go together and the counter guy would give me that look that said, “Are you sure?”  Just like checking into the Pitkin Hostel, I was afraid everyone would see me for the phony out-of-towner I was.  I know… all because of a freakin’ hot dog!  But there it is.  Just to be safe, I ordered a dog with the works, letting them decide what was best to put on and leave off.  Lauren, not one to spend so much time fretting over a meal, got hers with cheese sauce. 

We both agreed the hotdogs were okay, though certainly not something we’d drive twenty miles out of our way for again.  That’s not meant to disrespect Mustard’s Last Stand either, because really who does drive twenty miles for a hot dog?  That’s the beauty of locally famous food – no matter where you are, it’s always just down the block.  Across the street from our own apartment in Philadelphia there was a sandwich shop that made the most awesome hoagies and cheesesteaks.  Though in retrospect, I think part of what made them so awesome was the fact that we literally just had to walk across the street to pick them up.  But would we have given a tourist from England (or even Delaware) exact and detailed directions on how to get there, knowing they’d have to fight with trolleys, college students and carjackers to find a parking spot?  The steaks were good, but they weren’t that good.  When I worked in New York City, there was never that one really great deli I went out of my way to eat at because they had “the best sandwiches.”  It was New York for crying out loud.  All the delis had great sandwiches!  I just went to the ones that were closest to our office.  I’m sure it’s the same with Chicago and its red hots.  The people there don’t travel miles out of their way to eat a hot dog… they just eat hot dogs.

I will give Mustard’s credit though.  This was a place that gave hole-in-the-wall restaurants a good name.  It had an old classic grease house look with the grill and cooks in full view behind the counter and padded stools facing out wall-sized windows toward the street.  The lighting, the tables and the decor were all dark and gritty enough to give it a nice “lived-in” look without worrying that you’d end up with a cockroach in your food.  The staff was generally more courteous than you’d expect to find in any dive, without putting on the fake and cartoonish friendliness of the waiters at Applebee’s.  We even got into a running conversation with the restaurant’s manager about our upcoming addition.  He had some theory as to why it was better to raise girls than boys, but his accent was too thick and his speech patterns too fast for either of us to catch the whole thing.

After dinner we continued south in stop-and-go traffic around the perimeter of Lake Michigan, passing through the middle of Gary, Indiana.  For some reason, I always pictured Gary as the quintessential American town, complete with a town hall and pretty suburban houses with paperboys, sprinklers and garage door openers.  I imagined a main drag with little malt shops hosting a monthly “classic car night” when all the local kids and old fellas would bring out their hot rods, open up the hoods and swap stories between burgers and chocolate sodas.  You know, the kind of town where American Graffiti took place.  I honestly don’t know why I envisioned it that way – perhaps it was that stupid song from The Music Man – but it really is the most backwards image one could have in their head of Gary, which was the most foul-smelling, chemical-producing, smog-choking, smokestack-growing industrial town I have ever seen save for Elizabeth, New Jersey.  This apparently used to be a thriving steel town – perhaps not far off from the picture I had in my head – but it’s been on a more or less constant downward spiral since the 1960’s.  With over twenty-five percent of the population currently living below the poverty line, Gary’s crime rate has consistently earned it a reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in the country.  It made us quite glad we’d bitten the bullet and paid the higher-than-average gas prices up in Evanston.  It would have more-than-sucked to pull off and look for a gas station around here. 

But we made it through without getting shot or asphyxiated from god knew what toxic chemicals spewing into the air.  We continued to hug the lake’s shore on our tiny jaunt through Indiana into Michigan, and into our old friend Eastern Time Zone.  Closer to home than ever now.  We drove a little further until we felt comfortable that we were out of Gary’s circle of influence, stopping in Benton Harbor where our Motel 6 guide indicated the cheapest rooms we’d found all trip.  We’d made great mileage over the last couple days, meaning it would only be a very short drive to Ann Arbor in the morning. 

ONTO DAY 26