101001 – west midwest

I had an unmemorable meal in an unmemorable town somewhere in north central Nebraska, and pressed on.

I was looking forward to Postville, because I had odd memories of it from eight years ago.  Somewhere around here is a giant meat processing plant, and it would seem that this plant packs kosher meat, because to my utter confusion I ran into a couple of Hassidic rabbis at the soda machine when I stayed at the motel here last time. The town seemed odd again this time, and a little creepy also.

Downtown was the usual 5-10 blocks of 25 mph driving between rows of respectable two-story houses, except there was a cop at one of the houses having a serious interchange with some Snoop Dogg-looking dude … Postville seems to have different people than all the towns before and after it on the road through northern Nebraska, no doubt because it’s essentially industrial rather than a farming town.  And sure enough, there was a Hassidic rabbi ambling through the parking lot near my former motel. I just see different stuff in Postville, and that’s a fact.

… more … driving …

It’s the third time in ten years I’ve ended up in more or less exactly this situation:  zooming down nominally quiet country roads, the cruise control set carefully to eight miles over the speed limit (55+8 = 63 mph), over the hills and through the valleys, past houses and farms, crossing county roads, with serious bottom-line work going on all around.  This is harvest time and how your harvest goes determines how your financial year goes.

Endless fields that would at other times of the year be simply …. endless fields are now hives of activity; threshers, balers, reapers, soil turners, god knows what all the boxy, spindly praying mantis-looking contraptions do!  But they are all in the fields or trundling down the middle of the roads, and most exciting of all, liable to pop out of a side road at any moment!  At any other time of the year the farmers would be inclined to politely wait, but this time of year time is money, and the attitude seems to be “sorry, I’ve got money to make, so here I come and you’re just going to have to deal with it”.

As dusk approaches it really is quite pretty, the silos reflecting the pink clouds, that sort of thing, but for some reason (I think because there are so few places to stop) I end up pushing myself and hurrying.  This time I want to press on to spend the night along the Mississippi River.

Pikes Peak State Park, what an excellent discovery.  It is crazy crowded!   The countryside has been basically deserted for the last three days, so when I got to the end of the eight miles of country road to get here, to find it almost full was quite shocking.  The viewpoint overlooking the Mississippi flood plain was panoramic; sunset the other direction was even more spectacular!  The campground was just fine. My morning hike along bluffs high above the river was perfect.

I took the back way out in the late morning.  In the small town of Gutenberg, a Sunday church dinner was happening, and I did it!   I did it and I guess had a good time… SO white! Not only were there no persons of color, there weren’t even any obviously non-Nordic types – everybody seemed to be pureblood.  Waiting in the slooow line I amused myself pretending this was a Viking mead hall, imagining which of these white boys would have been the big dawgs back in the day when they were terrorizing Europe. Gawd I ate so much.  The sign said “beef and ham dinner”.  I told myself that it would be interesting local cuisine, but the joke was on me. It was canned ham and these processed looking identical ovals of “beef”.  The mashed potatoes and slaw were ok, and I told myself that the corn was fresh off the cob rather than out of an industrial-sized can.  I dunno … seeemd like a good idea at the time… maybe that is the local cuisine!  But in any event, that was about noon and I did not eat a single bite of anything else the rest of the day and night. So it did the job.

Drove on to Illinois, big FAIL on the campground I aimed for; it turned out to be tents-only. It was basically dark, so I was kinda screwed. Necessity being the well-known mother of invention, this was the night that I came to love the 3GS feature of my iPad. As you may know, this feature includes GPS tracking of where you are.  So I whipped out the device, googled for campgrounds, asked for directions from where I was to where it was, and followed it in the pitch black down deserted country roads another 30 miles or so to a very nice and cheap ($8!) state park campground.