The Road Less Traveled

I love the Interstate. Give me I-80, I-94, I-76, and I’m happy. There are no secrets traveling on a major highway—you always know where you are and how far it is to where you want to go. Life on the highway is easy—fuel, food, and an ever so efficient pit stop just an off-ramp away. The diesel is always fresh, the quarter-ponders plentiful, and the ubiquitous travel plaza, the heart and soul of four-lane living, means never having to charm a gas station attendant to use the bathroom.

You can have your County Road 12, with the accordion-style traffic backups behind the tractors out for a Sunday drive. I’ll skip the two-lane excitement, speed traps, and the little towns where the locals congregate around the lawn mower store and stare down out-of-towners making tracks through their downtown. I want 65 mph (OK, 75) and my meals even faster. In my mind, the place between home and your destination is limbo. I don’t like to be in limbo; the sooner I get where I’m going, the better.

That is, until I crossed paths with Highway 150.

Obviously, I was a little disappointed to abandon Interstate 80, a fast-moving, four-lane free-for-all that runs from coast to coast. To me, it’s the mother of all highways, the Graceland of asphalt. If I ever needed to drive to California from my Chicago digs, I’d skip the trumped-up nostalgia of Route 66 and go I-80 all the way. But alas, where I needed to go, the major thoroughfare was Highway 150, a 60-mile stretch of tired pavement running from Moline to Galesburg, two western Illinois hotspots that I couldn’t wait to skip. And then, it got me.

Clear Road
At first, I was just relieved that there weren’t any tractors in sight. The road was moving freely and I was pushing the sedate 50 mph speed limit without a shred of guilt. But the towns were sort of pleasant and charming. When I saw the sign for “Fresh Dug Taters” at a roadside stand, I couldn’t resist. I jawed with a few locals about the motorhome I had on loan. A bag of peaches, spuds, and corn later, I was warming up to life below 70 mph. Or maybe it was the homemade cashew brittle?

My wife and I gabbed with the checkout clerk at the local grocery store. She saw my wife’s pregnant belly, and peppered us with questions about the new kid for a while. The woman hoped it wouldn’t be too hot at the campground for her. Even though we said we were on vacation, she still asked if we wanted to join the store’s discount club. Nah, just passing through, we said.

The campground was so remote it took two U-turns, the much-maligned Y-turn, stopping for directions, and a call to the owners to get us there. But it was worth it; not a peep of traffic, and welcomed peace from the easy-on, easy-off Interstate that I usually prefer. With a day to kill, we traveled to Galesburg, home of poet Carl Sandburg, wonderful crepes, and a bag full of toys for junior. I don’t think the truck stops I usually frequent would have had “Baby’s First Briefcase,” complete with toy cell phone, calculator, and car keys in tote like the town’s small toy store had. Start him off young, I say.

Old West
As a child of Time-Life’s Old West books bound in faux leather, I couldn’t resist a trip to Wyatt Earp’s boyhood home a few towns over. With Highway 150 ended, we hopped onto I-34, a bland autobahn that left us both a little sad. We missed the see-all charms of that pokey highway, with its spontaneous stops and characters along the way.

Fortunately, Monmouth, Illinois, was full of slow lanes. We moseyed along the back streets looking for any sign of Earp, but the town seemed indifferent to his existence. And then there it was, a house just like any other, except for a small placard and Earp’s profile with handlebar mustache painted on a fence. The caretaker was all too happy to show us around the place, decked out with artifacts, books and articles, all the while recounting stories of the famous lawman’s exploits. He showed us the fenced-in area next door, where they put on a re-creation of the gunfight at the OK Corral twice a year. He invited Anne and me several times to take part in the upcoming show. He apologized, but he had dibs on the part of Doc Holiday. He even grew a mustache for it. But I could be Wyatt Earp, he said.

Me, Wyatt Earp? I just love the back roads, don’t you?

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