It takes 34 days to drive from Chicago to the Atlantic Ocean.
Or so it seemed.
We made a firm plan so we could avoid the traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway and zip into the glories of Indiana–with its glowing refineries, corn-crammed farmland, persistent, juicy, window-slamming bugs and thundering trucks–as soon as possible.
At 4:10 a.m., with a thermos of fresh coffee and an ice chest full of health drinks, sweet gherkins and peanut butter- and-jelly sandwiches, we were off.
Why take food, you might ask, when there are so many eating options over 880 miles?
I’ll tell you why, pilgrim.
Much of it is abysmal captive-audience food.
Where are the hot roast-beef sandwiches, home-baked pies, hand-cut fries of my youth?
Lost.
Indiana offers fast food. Ohio offers fast food on one end and fast food–but in very modern buildings–on the other.
And Pennsylvania, home of chicken corn soup, funnel cakes, shoofly pie and scrapple? Same story. There is no scrapple on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That is too bad. No one has ever done better with leftover pig parts than the scrapple industry. Liver-flavored yet, miraculously, not actually liver.
Instead, there is turnpike food at once-classic limestone road stops that the state has managed to wreck by trying to make them contemporary.
I am not buying pizza on the turnpike.
There are at least a few picnic tables for peanut butter sandwich eating. But not many.
No, the two things you don’t want to do on the nation’s superhighway system are stop to eat in a restaurant or stop to go to the bathroom, because although they do try, I’ve seen nicer jakes in rural Ireland.
How fast do you drive?
I have a diesel that has a built-in vacation speed monitor that tips off at about 80 m.p.h.
“You are going 80 m.p.h.! The speed limit is 65,” I am warned.
Do you know how long it takes to get through Ohio at the speed limit?
It takes 17 days, at least, or so it seemed. That’s 17 days of not going to the bathroom on the turnpike. It’s clearly 2,400 miles from the western border just to Toledo.
Pennsylvania, The Long State, is worse, although much prettier.
It has a windmill farm at Somerset, six gigantic windmills stretched across the top of the hill, just whooshing away, majestically, and drumming up enough kilowatts to make dark toast for 34 percent of the population of the East Coast.
(I made that up. But I think all such statistics are made up. How could anyone ever check?)
Pennsylvania now has an entrance fee. It costs $3 to get in from the west. I suspect this is actually a toll to cover the 50 miles or so of highway that leads from Ohio to the actual turnpike. But it feels like an entrance fee to a rural theme park.
We stopped to visit kin and then headed into Lancaster, where the simple folk come to gawk at the Amish and dump money from their cars and buy brooms and the like. We then turned south toward Delaware.
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We came to a point at which we once made a terrible mistake.
Delaware Highway 1 takes you on down the coast and over to Dover and then finally to the connection that delivers you to Bethany Beach.
U.S. Highway 1 in Maryland takes you to a part of Baltimore you don’t want to visit unless you are an urban affairs writer measuring decline. A car full of beach toys with bikes on top seemed somehow vastly out of place, as though we were, well, bait.
Whenever I am in this region, I think of that mistake.
We had a fabulous beach week with the extended family because there really are no bad vacations with my family.
Then we turned around and came back.
It takes a long time to get to a vacation for which you have been longing.
But it doesn’t take long at all to get back to work.
That’s relativity for you.
Another lesson in relativity:
A gallon of diesel cost $3.20 in Evanston and $2.73 in Indiana.
How could this be?
The kindly Indiana folks don’t tax it as much.
Vacation lessons:
1. Peanut butter and jelly continues to delight and satisfy.
2. Avoid the facilities for as long as possible.
3. Buy fuel in Indiana.
How awful was it overall?
I would be in my car at 4 a.m. tomorrow heading to the ocean again, if only I could.