2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 10

 

This is Part 8 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

My first stop this morning was for breakfast, at the Red Apple in Dixon, Illinois. Good food, good service, good prices, and the place was clean. The only problem was that, since I had started my Google Maps instructions directly from my motel (in the email I'd sent myself) but actually started the drive from the restaurant, I seemed not to be on the right route. But once I followed the directions to the point where the two routes converged, everything was okay. 

Technology. Arrgh. I'll say no more.

Miners' monument

So I followed my planned route first to the memorial for the 289 miners who died in a mine fire in Cherry, Illinois about 120 years ago. The monument stands on the mass grave of the men and boys who died that day. They were mostly Italian-Americans, so half of me felt a sort of bond. 

Starved Rock

After that, I went off to Starved Rock State Park, along the Illinois River.  Pontiac was a chief of the Ottawa (or Odawa) tribe who was murdered in 1769 by people from the Illinois tribe. (He, like Black Hawk, also has a war named for him, but that plays no part in this story.) The Illinois indians had a village near the Illinois River; that village was attacked by the Ottawas (and their allies, the Potawatomis) in revenge for the murder, and its inhabitants took refuge on a high bluff overlooking the river. Rather than come down and be massacred, they slowly starved to death on top of their rock. That gave the rock the name Starved Rock, and it's now the centerpiece of a State Park.

When I got to the park, I followed the signs for the Visitors' Center. I turned off the park road into a vast parking lot, nearly empty except for lines of port-a-potties. I tooled around the lot, saw nothing that looked like a visitors' center, then made a driving tour of the rest of the park. River Area; Lodge; Campgrounds; Overflow Parking Areas (several of them). Still saw nothing, so I went back to the original location. This time I saw it, hidden behind the first row of port-a-potties and a bus. So I parked and went up to find out where Starved Rock was. There was a map in a signboard that told me it was an "easy paved path with two staircases" and a little over half a mile's walk.

view from the rock

It turned out that that "easy paved path with two staircases" takes you up to a boardwalk that goes around the rock. It has nice views of the river, but otherwise is nothing worth seeing. Oh, and those staircases? Five stories' worth.

While I was up there, I noticed a belvedere on the next bluff, not too far away, from which I figured I could get a decent photo of Starved Rock. So off I went. Got up there, got my picture, came back down. Just for fun, I counted the steps: 303. That's three hundred and three steps up, and three hundred and three steps down, very slowly. I should have made that trek before I developed arthritis in my right knee. (Which, by the way, if I only have arthritis in my right knee, why is it that it's my left knee that always hurts? Just one of life's little mysteries.)

Naturally, I sweated up a storm. Good thing I'm by myself in the car.

As I drove to my next stop, in Pontiac, Illinois (named for the murdered Ottawa chief, not the car) I recognised that I was passing out of the pleasant rolling countryside and into the flat, boring, Indiana-style landscape, with straight roads and pointless stop signs. 

Once in the town of Pontiac, it was easy to find the Pontiac-Oakland Car Museum: it's right across from the courthouse. The town provides free wi-fi in the downtown area (that is, the blocks facing the courthouse; basically anywhere that's close enough to hear the uninterrupted Greatest Hits of the 1970s and 1980s that play from a series of speakers all around the courthouse). I decided to grab lunch first, something light, so I stepped into a restaurant on the corner. On the Specials board there was a listing for Chicken Pot Pie Soup, which sounded interesting; I like chicken pot pie. I asked the waitress about it; she claimed that the restaurant is "known for it," so I ordered it. (She did admit that she's "not a pie person" and has never tried it herself.) It wasn't bad, but an hour and a half later I thought I was going to be sick. Literally: I went to the public library and stood in the rest room waiting to barf. Didn't, though, so when the urge subsided I left. Did not feel 100% though for the rest of the day.

'57 Chevy Artcar

By the way, you might remember that some time back there was a craze going around the country for painting uniform sculptures to raise funds for various charities. I know in San Antonio we did cows. A town in Kansas that I went to did miniature Swedish horses. Somewhere I've seen buffalo done up in all kinds of arty ways and scattered around town, and I seem to recall a town that had armadillos; I don't remember where that was. And Winnipeg, Manitoba, did polar bears, so it was an international craze. Well, the town of Pontiac joined the craze by having artists paint ... Chevrolets. Go figure. 

The Pontiac-Oakland Car Museum is free to visit. That is the only thing in its favour. It's a fairly small space, and the display consists of only 16 cars, a few cases of Pontiac-related memorabilia, and a small gift shop. The information given about the cars ranges from none at all to the bare minimum. Most cars have a sign that gives the year and model, the number made, and the name of the owner. The rest have no signage at all. The museum makes no effort at educational purpose, despite having quite the impressive looking library in its space. Presumably all those books and papers contain information about Pontiac and Oakland cars. The displayed vehicles are shown in such a way that only a part of them can be seen. You can't walk around them at all. 

1978 Pontiac Phoenix Hatchback

Consider the 1978 Pontiac Phoenix Hatchback, set up with a tent exploding from its rear end. What does that look like from the back? Was it an available option for buyers of the car? (It looks like it might have been.) What would such a thing add to the price of the car? How many people sprung for the tent-thing? In 1978, the American auto industry was still recovering from the 1973 Gas Crisis, and the introduction of regulations requiring catalytic converters. I remember how crappy American cars were in those years. Hell, I owned one of them (a '76 Monte Carlo, which, despite its limitations, I loved). Did the '78 Phoenix manage to introduce anything innovative? (The tent was an oddity, but not an innovation; VW Microbuses had had tents built in long before, and I've seen similar things on cars going back all the way to the 1930s, if not before that.) 

Or the 1960 Pontiac Ventura. A beautiful car, displayed in the milieu of a service bay. Don't you know I'd love to be able to walk around and see what those back lights look like? How the fins are treated? The rear bumper, the trunk lock? Small things, and yes, I'm sure I've seen all those things before, on the many previous 1960 Pontiac Venturas that have passed through my life since that year. (My God, that's very nearly my entire life.)

And what the Hell is a Pontiac Firefly? Was it just so supremely unsuccessful that I never saw one, or knew of its existence in the world? And what's the relationship of Pontiac Motor Division to Oakland? Why do they share a museum? (I actually have some idea of that, but how many visitors to the museum don't?) How much effort would it take to answer these basic questions? Too much, it seems, for the Pontiac-Oakland Car Museum. 

I left, feeling actually pissed off that I'd gone so far out of my way to see that museum. Never mind the other places I went to; the car museum was my reason for what was in essence a half-day detour from where I'm going. And for sixteen cars and almost no information. (It certainly didn't help that, just yesterday, I'd visited such a large and well-presented car collection in Coralville, Iowa.) The fact that it was free to visit is small consolation for the time wasted.

I was almost out of cash, so I'd found a Chase branch close to my planned route, in a town near Joliet, and plugged that into my Google Maps route. (on the bright side, that detour got me 40 miles without a turn, so I could play the music on my USB for a while without worry.) It took me to the entrance of a subdivision six miles out of my way. I looked the address up again, put it in again, and this time it took me to the correct location, about a mile farther down the road.

Technology. Grrr. 

After that I made only one stop, to see a statue in Munster, Indiana. After having driven to that location, I have the idea that Hell is very much like the Chicago suburbs.

Click on "Newer Post" below to continue reading this gripping travelogue.

2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 9

 

This is Part 7 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

I should probably allot more time to car museums in my trip planning, or just not worry about it. Having missed out on seeing the Terrill Museum in DeLeon, Texas; the Heart of 66 museum in Sapulpa, Oklahoma; the Tulsa Museum of Art Deco; Howard's Toys for Big Boys Museum in Chanute, Kansas; the Museum of American Speed in Lincoln; the Schildberg Automobile Museum in Greenfield, Iowa (which may be out of business now); and the Kline Automobile Museum in Prescott, Iowa because of timing, I wasn't about to add the Antique Car Museum of Iowa to that list; so I went to Coralville, which required about 30 miles of backtracking, and checked into a hotel for the night (the same one, incidentally, that I stayed in when I was in Coralville with Rick years ago), and this morning I hung around the town waiting for the museum to open at 10AM. There is very little to do in Coralville, Iowa between 6AM and 10AM. I had breakfast and lots and lots of coffee, and played cards on my computer and read Makers and Takers, a book about the negative effects of the financial industry on American business. I was there when the museum opened; no surprise.

an exception: a 1903 Cadillac Runabout

There's plenty of two-hour on-street free parking in the area of the museum. After two hours I had to go out to move my car. I was in the museum, all together, for three hours. It's fairly large, and has 86 cars on display, arranged more or less chronologically. About half of the space is given over to cars from before the Great Depression, many of which I've never heard of: Holsman; Sears (yes, you ordered it from their catalog); Economy Motor Buggy; Haynes-Apperson; Brush; Demot; Maytag (the washing-machine company tried making cars for a while); Haynes; Whippet; Gardner; Velie; Elmore; National; and Milburn Electric. (The museum provides a list of all the cars on the floor.) And of the cars I have heard of, there were many models I had never seen before. (I hardly took any pictures of the older cars; most of them look alike to me. My interest is mainly in styling, which only began to matter in the mid-to-late 1920s.) Having the cars arranged chronologically made it easy for me to trace developments in early design -- for example, fender fairings, wheel design or standardizations that we take for granted now, like left-hand drive.

Cautionary tale

The museum itself only owns about eight of the cars; the rest belong to people in the area who lend their vehicles for display. While many of the cars are beautifully restored, a number of them are in less than pristine condition, including one Model T that had a tree land on it during a recent storm. It's there, tree limb and all, as a cautionary tale. A number of them seem to be mid-restoration; for example, one vehicle had a front seat that had clearly been restored, while the back seat was just springs. I found the contrast interesting. 

All of the cars were American-made, except for a 1939 Hanomag (German) and a 1964 Volkswagen Beetle (also German). (They were there to make a particular point, but I forget now what that point was.) Because the cars were arranged chronologically (with a few exceptions), and because I could walk all the way around almost every one of them, and because each car had a very informative sign associated with it, I thought this museum is one of the best I've seen at presenting automotive history. Many of the signs go into the history of the manufacturer, which is particularly useful in promoting understanding of the early days of the industry, when it was kind of a Wild West business (like the phone business in the 1980s, or cellphones or internet service in the 2000s). Carmakers merged, or got bought out, or just folded with such regularity and rapidity that it's often hard to know who the players were. 

When I finally tore myself away from the museum, I headed off to Jones and Clinton Counties, and so I have now visited all the counties in Iowa. That makes 36 states that I've finished with; and if I stick to my trip plan, that number will be 39 before I get back home.

The terrain in eastern Iowa is pretty. Many of the roads are boringly straight, but there are enough that curve up and down hills and through river bottoms and woodlands to make me want to hug myself with the joy of driving. The same is true of Illinois -- and, frankly, of almost every state east of the Dry Line. (The only exception I'm aware of is northern Indiana, which is in its own category of boring.)

Mississippi River at Sabula, Iowa

For the drive from Coralville to the Mississippi River, I'd taken the precaution of emailing the route to myself last night. I'm not sure if that made a difference; I think it still needs an internet connection, but as far as I can tell I had 4G service the whole time today. And I avoided technology issues with my audiobook software by not turning it on. I drove in silence all day, and found it relaxing in a kind of 20th-Century way. I may never turn the radio on again; at least, not while I'm using GPS.

The Black Hawk Statue overlooking the Rock River

I stopped in Oregon, Illinois to book a hotel down the road and to visit the so-called Black Hawk statue in one of the state parks in the area. The statue isn't actually intended as a representation of Black Hawk -- a chief of the Sauk and Fox tribe who refused to leave after other chiefs gave up tribal lands in the early 1800s. The 1832 war to evict him and his followers -- the Black Hawk War -- saw a young captain of volunteers named Abraham Lincoln posted to Dixon, a town 20 miles or so south on the Rock River. In the early 1900s, a monumental statue of a generic Indian was built at Oregon, while some time after that a lifesized bronze statue of a young Abe Lincoln was erected at Dixon.

Lincoln

Both sides' heroes are represented, one realistically, one romantically.

I had intended to stop at another state park near Oregon, a place called Castle Rock. I drove right past it. I had forgotten to check my plan on RoadTrippers, and was distracted by the beauty of the Rock River on the left-hand side and by a tailgater in my rearview mirror (until I flashed my rear fog lights; he backed off then). I thought about going back to it -- it's only about 15 miles. But I only had it as a stopping place because it's supposed to give a grand view of the river, and I feel like I got that just from the road. So, no; not going back. Instead I will go on to Starved Rock, which is ahead of me. I'm also going to skip the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home, the John Deere Historical Site, and the John Deere Home, because, frankly, I'm not sufficiently interested in those places to actually go to them. 

I checked into my motel (on Bloody Gulch Road, of all places) and found a place for dinner called The Corner Spot Bar & Grill. Ever since I started travelling in the upper midwest, I've found that places called "Bar & Grill" have a certain old-world atmosphere about them. Before I started going to them, I thought they were, you know, just bars. But up here in the North, they're more like quaint, unpretentious taverns where you can get a beer or a whiskey with your meal. So I purposefully looked on line for "Bar & Grill". The only one listed locally is an expensive restaurant at a country club. So I just looked for "Bars" and found several listings, all of which had food. I picked one that seemed a likely candidate for the kind of ambience I was looking for -- the kind of place that would be at home on McKay Avenue in Spring Valley, Wisconsin, or along the highway in Trempeleau. 

The Corner Spot was not that kind of place. It was a generic sports bar. But it had friendly staff and reasonable prices (and all orders come with unlimited salad bar -- my first vegetables in a while, I think), and they put a soccer game on for me. Sadly, it was perhaps the dullest MLS match of the past 25 years, between Philadelphia Union and Atlanta. Every time I looked up at the screen, play was stopped for a foul or an injury; and every time I looked away, somebody scored. And the pace of play seemed slow. It did not make me think, Gee, I should watch more MLS. 

I ate too much for the first time on this trip.

Click on "Newer Post" below to continue