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Somewhere East of Indianapolis, IN
05/28/04
This can't be long because it's almost pm already and I'm way behind on the driving. As it stands now, I could be hitting Saint Louis in the middle of rush hour on the friday before memorial day. I actually might take back roads through missouri and Kansas to avoid all that. We'll see...
So yesterday and last night were pretty horrible. It's always tough the first day of long driving on a trip like this. I'm not used to all the miles and you start to think "Am I really going to do this for seven days?"
I drove and drove and drove through Pensilvania, Ohio and into Indiana. The first part of the day, we stopped in a National Park and cooked some lunch with my propane burner and made another stop in some gas station in the middle of nowhere, and took these pictures of this bus that I guess used to be the touring vehicle for some Monster truck called the "Additude Adjuster". It's all rusty now with flat tires so I guess he's not adjusting very many additudes anymore.
The second half of the day was dreary dreay driving. On and on and on. I might have stopped sooner but the rain was just pouring down everywhere I went. Huge storms all day and night. I was determined to camp and not go to a motel so I guess I figured I'd drive out of the storm at some point. But it just got worse and worse. Everywhere I went, the radio kept breaking for weather bulletins containing thunderstorm warnings, severe flood warnings. The warnings weren't much used to me because they were all broken down by county and other local geography details which I had no way of knowing if I was near them or not.
So on and on I trudged. At around 11pm, I had driven about 600 miles and was starting to see bunnies on the road and guard-rails that weren't there so I figured I'd better break down and get a motel. As luck would have it, the exit I decided to take had a sign for a campground. It was still raining, but not as hard as before, so I decided to go ahead and camp, even though I was way too tired to set up a tent.
The signs for the campground took me about ten miles away from the highway, which seemed promising. I can't really figure out this area I'm in, though. It's mostly farmland, but then the farms are broken up by these suburban looking streets, only a few blocks at a time, with very new looking and "fancy" pre-fab houses. They look kind of "Mansiony" but then there'll be plastic lawn furniture in the front and a ford focus or Hundai parked in the driveway. I couldn't figure out who these people are. What do they do for a living? What kind of folks are they?
Anyway, the campground, which has been here since 1968, before, I'm sure, any of this stuff got built. I drove in and found a tent camping spot under some trees. THis time, getting the tent up was even harder because the tent poles kept coming apart and it was really raining a lot. And now that it wasn't my first time camping, the exhilaration of wondering if I could pull it off was not there. IT was just cold, wet and annoying. But I got the damn thing up and got into the car to undress and dry off. I have to say this tent is the coolest thing ever. It's not very well made but it works so well and it's fun because you feel like an astraunaut, climbing between two vessels through an air-lock in shorts and a t-shirt, while outside the enviroment is wildly unfriendly. I slept well despite the very loud rain crashing down on the roof of the tent and woke up about 8 this morning.
Loona and I went for a nice long walk, and then I took a bike ride through the neighborhood. It felt incredible to ride my bike across all cornfields, with the wind in my face. But occasionally I would drive right into a huge cloud of swarming gnats, face first. Somehow, I could never see them coming. I'd be pumping my bike along and then suddenly my face is getting smacked by hundreds of living beings all in one instant. What a strange feeling that is! It must be even stranger for the gnats. There they are, just swarming, minding their own business, when I come crashing through, ruining everythign. They'll probably talk about it for days "God, remember when the face came! That was fucked up! That goddamn face was huge!"
When I got back, Loona and I went for another much longer walk down some tiny paths through some incredible wild woods. I'm very sorry that there are no pictures of that because I was charging up the camera at the time.
We cooked a delicious simple breakfast of oatmeal and black russian tea on the propane stove and broke camp. I am now sitting in my car tapping this out before I go.
I am finding out that I'm a shitty camper. I'm learning, but by the time I'm done learning, I'll be home. I'm having a great time though. After all the times I've crossed this country, it's great to get this far without buying anything from anyone, except fresh water and gas. It's just Loona and me, more than ever. We have all the food and supplies we need. We have too much, in fact. I have SO MUCH CRAP! IT took me about an hour to break camp today because I finally had to sit down and consolidate all these crazy snacks and different foods and whatnot I got at the health food store. I threw out about fifty pouds of trash, reduced the food that I keep next to me to things I might actually eat and tried to make sense of all the camping suppplies, wihch is hard in such a small car.
Like an idiot, I did not bring my boots. I have two pairs of mesh and rubber running shoes, which I alternate between. ONe night I wear one pair till they're soaked and caked with mud and the next day I wear the other pair while the first pair tries to dry out in the back of the car as I drive. OF course, they are both helplessly damp and dirty at this point. In general, laundry is becoming a drag. I have a growing pile of wet, filthy clothes and they are becoming yet another thing to find room for in the tiny car.
Okay, I really have to hit the road now so I'm going to quickly stuff some pictures on this and post it. See you all tomorrow.
Thanks for reading.
LCK