Memories and miles

I got another early start and thank goodness for that. I still had part of Indiana to conquer and it was going to be windy again. While skirting Indianapolis, I remembered a work project I had here with Ascension Health. It was the first engagement I had where my counterpart at the customer kept throwing me under the bus because she didn’t want to do her job.

And I remembered this funky little jog you have to take to move between i65 and I74 on a six lane stop and go road thought suburbia. Why don’t they just finish the by-pass?

But mostly I was remembering the year I decided to drive from Minnesota back to Delaware on this the southern route with my two daughters and a friend.

We came down I39 which breaks off before Chicago and then connects with I74. We were coming up on Champaign, Il when I noticed the engine reviving but I wasn’t doing anything different with the gas pedal. Then I saw the smoke coming out of the back of the car. :(

I was able to get from the left lane into the right and coast off on an exit where I came to a stop at a gas station. I went in and asked if they knew a tow truck and they did. I got a hold of the guy just minutes before he was done for the day and he agreed to come get me despite the fact that his very pregnant wife had dinner waiting for him. He took all of us to a mechanic to drop off the mini van, and the dropped us off at a hotel I had managed to book in the midst of all this. I gave him a nice tip and thanked him profusely and told him to thank his wife for being patient.

The next day, I got the crushing news that my transmission was dead. The good news is a shop nearby can fix it and put in a great Allison tranny. But that is going to take several days and I need to get back to work. So, I called the work travel agent to see if she could find me a one way car rental that didn’t cost a mint. She did, but we’d have to get to the Indianapolis airport that was an hour and a half away. Ok, I’ll figure it out.

I asked at the hotel front desk, and they “knew a guy” who had a taxi service who would do it. We crammed what we could into his mini van and off we went to Indianapolis. As we were pulling up to the airport, there was a beautiful rainbow, and I said this must be a sign everything is going to be ok.

We got our rental car and before I started a marathon drive to Delaware, we stopped at a Perkins to eat. The poor waiter. We were so punchy by this time, we were cracking bad jokes and laughing at everything, but he rolled with it.

It did all turn out. We got home. I dropped off the rental car and picked up a local one. A week or so later, I flew back to Bloomington/Normal, got a car service to Champaign (another long ride) and picked up my Odyssey with its shiny new tranny. I drove back in between working and calls. I can laugh about it now. But also, why do I worry about my next adventure having issues when I’ve already been through that???

I hope you enjoyed the digression, because it was more interesting than getting wind blasted on the freeway. I got set up at my campsite in record time and started to figure out what I wanted to see. Blackhawk is an important guy around here, so I booked over to a museum to find out more about him because they would not be open on Monday.

The museum was small but had some amazing Native American artifacts including a very rare dugout canoe that some kids found in the river. It also depicted the four season living off the land of the Sauk and Fox.

Blackhawk fought for the British in the War of 1812, and led a rebellion against the US Army over 51 million acres of land the Americans had taken in a swindle. He lost and 1000 of his brothers with him. Eventually, he was forces to move to Iowa. He did dictate his auto biography n which wa published to great success.

The museum was the brain child of Tom Hauberg, a local man who had collected these artifacts. It was built in the early 1930s by the CCC or Civilian Conservation Crops Formed by Franklin Roosevelt to employ men during the depression. The movie about the camp with interviews of some of the men who worked there and they talk about the army like schedule, the meals with scoops of everything on the same plate topped with Jello, and their pride in their work.

The site was formerly an amusment park funded by the trolley system. One of the main attractions was the greased tobbagon run that dropped 100 feet into the water. Imagine the screams of people as they went down that!!! In its place now are steps to the Mississippi River. The park closed when the popularity of the automobile put the trolleys out of business. That’s how it came to be available for the CCC to rebuild and naturalize the park.

By now, I was truly tired and ready to retire to my little home away from home. But I made a quick detour to the Hy-Vee liquor store to pick up some local brews. The jalopeno beer that they recommended was quite good with my mock nachos!