I’ve spent my summer thinking about (dreading) the road trip to bring my son to graduate school in California; today it began when we drove away from our house at 7:15a.m., only an hour later than we had hoped. That’s pretty much an on-time performance in our house. Hooray us.
If you’re anything like me, preparing for vacation is a carnival of chaos, all last-minute scramble, little or no organization and planning. Laundry needed for the suitcases gets done the day before travel, only a subset of the perishables in the refrigerator get consumed or thrown out, the house never gets cleaned, and something always gets forgotten. Today I forgot to move wet laundry from the washing machine, setting up the prospect of it mildewing for more than a week. Fortunately, since we live in a world with text messaging, I alerted our house/dog sitter, and all will be taken care of. Thank you, modern technology.
Day 1 of travel took us from Chicago to St. Louis and on to Springfield, Mo. We’re following Route 66 to California (roughly), the first time I’ve traveled it. I’m underwhelmed by the amount of kitsch we’ve seen so far, but I have great confidence that it will increase in variety and frequency. Illinois offered precious little silliness from the highway, though we did see an antique store outside Springfield that seemed to specialize in large fiberglass people, animals and objects. It was the giant pink elephant that caught my eye, and if it had been holding a martini glass in its trunk I might have made my husband backtrack to see it up close. Alas, no martini glass, so it wasn’t the pink elephant that adorned the liquor store I used to patronize when I lived in Springfield. Drive on.
We blew right on past the fiberglass decor, and also right past Edwardsville, stopping at the Edwardsville rest area just long enough to take a picture of ourselves waving hello to a friend of my son, who goes to school at the university there. Here we are, all up at the top of a playground slide.
The highlight of our day was lunch in St. Louis with my husband’s godmother, whom we don’t see nearly often enough. Lots of reminiscing and catching up as we lingered perhaps too long in a restaurant before parting with heartfelt hope that we’ll see each other again soon.
Back on the highway, we stopped next in Cuba, Mo., to see the Murals of Cuba, a series of 10 or so murals painted on building walls in this small town over a period of years. They commemorate scenes and events in town history, and they vary in artistic quality. But they made an interesting short diversion for us as we grabbed the opportunity to walk several blocks looking at them, stretching our legs after many hours in a rental van. One mural was a nice tribute to local soldiers who lost their lives in World War II. My favorite by far was a series of paintings depicting scenes from the Civil War. Organizing the Civil War paintings was a local youth’s Eagle Scout project, according to the historic plaque posted with them. I like that detail. Here’s most of my favorite painting:
Also in Cuba—or perhaps just outside of Cuba, at the end of the highway off-ramp, was a tourist info center with a quite lovely outdoor sculpture of an Osage family, commemorating the Osage Heritage Trail. You can see this sculpture from the highway, but it’s really worth taking the off ramp and getting out of your car to walk around it. Shown here is a side view. Something about this sculpture made me feel for the first time like I was traveling historic Route 66. We dropped a donation in the preservation fund jar before heading into Cuba to see the murals.
Then we hit the road again for our last leg of the day, a short jaunt of a couple hours to Springfield, Mo. And this stretch of road gave me the title for this blog post, from a billboard advertising the Uranus Fudge Factory, whose slogan is…what you see stated in the title. This billboard flew by too quickly for me to snap a photo, though I do sorely regret that. I must rely on this offering from @GlobalNomad87 on Twitter:
Hilarious #billboard outside of Springfield, MO. I died laughing. “The best #fudge comes from Uranus.” pic.twitter.com/nTN9mRnzYZ
— Mustafa Abdullah (@GlobalNomad87) June 21, 2015
Checked into our hotel for the night, we ventured out to dinner at the diner next door and found tables covered in advertisements that look they came out of the 1970s or 1980s, including the one shown at the very top of this post, cautioning us that “God doesn’t want to spend eternity with a bunch of losers.”
To be honest, neither do I.