I went to Illinois in the fall to visit a friend and see where she had moved. She is in Pekin, which is just outside Peoria. At least you can find Peoria on a map. Pekin is a bit of a trick. The first thing I discovered about driving there is that for a person who navigates by landmarks (me), it’s impossible. There are no landmarks. It is absolutely flat. No hills, no mountains. Flat. All the time I was there, I had no idea whether I was going east or west, north or south. I had the people riding with me correct me when trying to get on freeways a few times.
So, we headed off to see the sights in Chicago. For this, we plugged in the GPS on my phone. A nice, generic female voice and a screen with a pretty purple line to guide by. All was pleasant and quiet once we got on the freeway, and no comment from the GPS, since we had three hours to go in a more or less straight line to Chicago.
The adventure began when we spotted a beautiful old three-story brick house sitting all alone in a field by the freeway and decided to go get a better look at it. When we took the next exit, it woke up the GPS, which started saying we were off course. The road stopped being purple and our cute blue car showed itself tilted off the road like a tiny wreck. And the female voice started getting bossy. “Make the next legal u-turn,” she starts repeating at increasingly short intervals. We successfully ignored her until we found the house (for sale) after navigating several different roads around the corn fields.
We parked and walked up a long drive to get a good look and some pictures of it. Such a great, classy old place. The poor GPS was exhausting herself telling us to make the next legal u-turn, resetting and trying to get us back on the road.
After looking at the house, we headed toward the little town down the road and decided to find a place for breakfast. The town is called Towanda. I love the name. It always reminds me of one of the alter egos of the gal in “Fried Green Tomatoes,” when she is going through her midlife crisis. The character is “Towanda the Avenger.” It rolls off the tongue. So we decided to give that name to the GPS. Poor thing was still trying to get us back on the freeway.
We stopped by a fellow out walking his dog and asked where there was a place to eat. He said it was a small town and most folks ate at home, but there was a little diner at the end of the road. Off we went to the diner. It was called “Kicks on 66” and it is, indeed, on old Route 66. How cool is that? We were a bit late for breakfast, so we had their specialty lunch. I had a hamburger, and Kelli had pork wings. This is a pork chop trimmed to look like a drumstick and spiced and fried like buffalo wings. Really good.
Having found Route 66, we were having a nice drive back on the freeway toward Chicago, to the relief of Towanda the GPS. Her voice was getting a rest, and her road was pleasantly purple. And then we saw a sign for the Route 66 museum. Well, we just had to go see what that was about. Poor Towanda was beside herself again. Her vocabulary doesn’t expand much, but I believe that if it could, she’d have been begging by now: “PLEASE make the next legal u-turn!”
Anyway, the museum is in Pontiac, Ill. What a cool town. It has a marvelous old courthouse building and some great architecture. There are also many marvelous murals all over the downtown area. And the local high school art class has created a lot of miniature cars painted like animals, art, history and other subjects, and these were all over town on the sidewalks. There are footprints painted on the sidewalks, red for the mural tour and blue for the little cars. We wandered all over town taking pictures of the murals and the cars and the Route 66 museum. It was all great fun.
We did get back on the freeway and made Towanda happy. We had turned a three-hour drive to Chicago into a seven-hour adventure, created a new character for our continuing story, and had a blast.
Everybody Has A Story welcomes nonfiction contributions, 1,000 words maximum, and relevant photographs. E-mail is the best way to send materials so we don’t have to retype your words or borrow original photos. Send to neighbors@columbian.com or “Everybody has a Story,” P.O. Box 180, Vancouver WA 98666. Call Scott Hewitt, 360-735-4525, with questions.
