Pandemic Wandering: The End, But Not The End

I woke up at 4AM in Henderson, Kentucky, feeling bright-eyed and bushy tailed so I hit the road early. There was one outlying county in Western Kentucky, right on the Mississippi River -- one of those places that has only one road going through it, a county that will require a special effort to get to -- so I knew I had to get that one this trip, no matter what. After that there were 3 counties in southern Missouri that were less vital; counties I knew I could get on the way somewhere at some point. But a quick check of Google Maps last night told me that getting them on this trip would only add 3 hours to the drive home, which would already be two days' drive, so I figured I might as well go that way.

A thing of beauty poses
at the Mississippi River

I had planned to drive back roads to the Kentucky county, but forgot to tell Google Maps that, so ended up going pretty much directly there, and probably saved an hour or more by doing that. By the time I remembered what I had planned, I was in fairly flat country, which I figured wasn't worth the added time. Likewise for the trip across Missouri, until I actually got to the 3 destination counties, which were off the main roads. The road that connects the three is an Ozark Mountains Scenic Route, so that was fairly nice. I'd give it three and a half stars for pleasure driving.

By the time I got to the second of the three -- Texas County, as it happens; county seat: Houston -- I was dying for a shady spot to take a nap in. I was falling asleep at the wheel, and in my experience, when that happens, I need like a 5-minute nap and then I'm good to go the distance. I found Emmett Kelly Park in Houston. (Emmett Kelly was famous in my parents' time; I knew the name and that he was a clown, but not like Bozo, more of a rodeo clown.) There were two shaded spots, both taken, so I ended up finding some shade at a gas station on the main highway to try to nap in. Not a success.

Decided to take the main road back to the highway, because the highway went through that last of the 3 counties. To continue on the scenic route would have taken, I figured, maybe 30 minutes longer and it just wasn't exciting enough. Turned out, though, that the main road was under construction literally the entire way back to the highway, so the scenic route probably would have been a half hour faster.

And after that, it's been freeway all the way, or highway at least; right now, I'm stopped in some town in Oklahoma on a major US highway, not a freeway, where the speed limit changes every 200 yards and there are lots of traffic signals, and at each one there's a pair of semi tractors first in line, so it's a really frustrating drive. Yet Google Maps says it's not only the fastest route, but also the only one without tolls. (Having paid all my taxes for better than 50 years, I object to having to pay again to use the highways. On the plus side, though, I discovered today that my TexasTag works in Oklahoma, too, so I don't have to stop at the cash window. It makes the whole transaction only slightly less objectionable.)

Tomorrow I will get home, and it will be boring all the way, so I won't bother writing another post but will just let this one be the wrap-up. On a theme I introduced in a previous post, my little Sacramento Jag is drawing admiration where ever I stop. A convenience store clerk came out to look at it and to talk about what a joy it must be to drive in "these hills 'round yar" but cautioned me to be careful because "these folks drive with a sense of entitlement." That was the only multisyllabic word he used in the whole conversation. A guy at the hotel last night insisted on parking his truck on one side of my car and his motorcycle on the other, because "that's a purty car and these people, they don't care, they'll ding it up" otherwise. And a lady at a gas station asked if it was OK if she took pictures of my car. I said sure, just leave a dollar under the windshield wiper.

It's an ego boost. At the same time, it reminds me that it's not me. Nobody wants my picture....

And once again, here's a link to the pictures from this trip. The only ones I took today were the one above, and a similar one, so if you've already looked at them there won't be anything new to see.

Oh, one last thing, because I told the clerk at tonight's hotel desk that this was going in my blog: the fancy electric sign out front said rates started at $39.95, but the cheapest rate she had was $50 a night. I asked her who the $39.95 rate was for, disabled veterans and first responders? She said no, "This is so embarrassing ... we lost the manual for that sign...." So until the LED bulbs burn out in 30 years, it's going to be flashing $39.95.

I suggested she get a triggerhappy sheriff's deputy with a shotgun.

Pandemic Wandering, Day 6

So I've been through all the counties of Ohio now; and today I went through all the counties I'd planned to get to in Indiana. The original plan is to get one more county in Kentucky, and a few in southern Missouri, before heading home. That may change: after I post this blog I'm going to get on Google Maps and decide just how badly I want those remaining counties, compared to just how badly I want to get home.

Ohio was ... well, not very exciting. Pretty enough, like England after a good ironing. Everything green, farm after farm, copses of trees surrounded by fields, a stream here, a stream there, quaint little towns each with its Marathon station and six churches. The highways run straight from one to the next, a legacy of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (that's the law that gave us townships, ranges and sections, and drew all those nearly-straight lines on the map). Dull, orderly, settled.

Indiana is similar, although as you get close to the Ohio River it gets a little disorderly, and that's where I was today, for the most part. I found myself driving alongside the path of the old Whitewater Canal, which depended on the contours of the land and so wasn't all that straight, and the road alongside respects the hills and streams, too, and while not nearly as much fun as driving in eastern Kentucky, in the Appalachian moun

abandoned lock on the
Miami & Erie Canal

tains, it was a lot more fun than driving from, say, Indianapolis to Springfield.

When I was a schoolboy I was taught that the State of New York dug the Erie Canal and commerce was magically transformed. I never knew, though, that there were other canals in the US. A lot of them. The success -- the immediate success of the Erie spurred the construction of canals all across the settled parts of the country, which meant Ohio and Indiana and Illinois. So today I saw remains of two of those: the Miami and Erie Canal, in Ohio, and the Whitewater, in Indiana.

Headquarters of the Whitewater
Canal Company (1842)

Of course, the coming of the railroad doomed canal operations to the dustiest pages of history, but for a while there, maybe 30 years, they were the Wave of the Future, and huge amounts of money were invested in their construction and maintenance. It's too bad they didn't survive long enough to become tourist attractions, like canals in Europe.

I saw some graphs on TV this evening that make me want to get home. It was a series of four graphs, representing the corona virus pandemic in four industrialised nations: Italy, Spain, France, and the US. In each of the European countries, the infection rates shot up early, then went steadily down, back almost to zero. But in the US, it shot up to a peak, dipped slightly, and has continued at the rate of roughly 20,000 new infections a day ever since. We are making no headway in countering this disease in this country. Of course, most of the infections are coming from places where people are packed closely together: nursing homes, prisons, meat plants and other labor-intensive industrial operations (and soon, Trump rallies); but people who work at those places go home and spread the infection to their families, and they go to church on Sunday and spread the infection to their coreligionists, and they go to the takeout counter at the local restaurant and spread the infection to the workers there, who then go home and spread it to their families, their coreligionists, their friends ... more slowly, perhaps, but as relentlessly. And since, from what I've seen on this trip, very few people are taking the whole thing seriously, I am not as willing to be out among these people as I was when I thought San Antonio's response to the problem was normal, i.e., everybody in a mask, everybody keeping distance.

I guess our best hope for the future is that all the people who go to the Trump rallies next week in Tulsa and Mobile, and where ever else he's going to be, infect each other and die before the November election. That way we'll have a better chance of getting a competent government in place come January, and then things can start to improve. An awful thing to wish for, and I don't honestly wish for it. But there would be a certain poetic justice, a cosmic irony if you will, if it happened that way.

Oh, and once again, here's a link to all the pictures from this trip.