Day five: Des Moines, Iowa
Not a lot ot report today because yesterday was mostly driving. Except that when we reached Lincoln Nebraska, we stopped to see our old friend Ross Broccoli and his wife Barb. Ross is a comedian who used to work out of New York. He's very funny and we used to hang out years ago in places like Luna Lounge and rebar, at the beginning of all that "Alternative Comedy" shit. You probably have seen him in a TV commercial. I think he did a campaign for Holliday Inn or something. Anyway, Loona and I stopped to see them on the first trip we ever took across together, I guess in 2002. After all this time she seemed to have remembered because as soon as I opened the car door she trotted right out and up to Ross's front door, went in and started hanging out with Ross's dog, chicken.
Ross is growing mushrooms (the eating kind) in his kitchen in a green bucket.
Anyway, we hung out for a short while, in the living room. Ross gave me a bumper sticker that says "9-11 was an inside job". I told him probably I won't put it on the car until I get back to Los Angeles.
I would like to have hung out more with Ross but I've got to hit milage quotas now, because I'm just trying to get home as fast as possible.
My goal was Des Moines and I made it. I decided to take a night off from camping because there is a Sheraton Hotel in Des Moines and Sheraton is rare in that they are a big hotel chain with nice rooms who allows dogs. They don't even put you in a smoking room. You just have to sign a waiver and pay an extra 25 dollars.
So I went from eating camp-cooked soup with flies in it and sleeping on the ground by a lake, to a down comforter, soft pillows and room service.
Before going to sleep, Loona and I went for a walk around the area. The Sheraton is in West Des Moines, which seems to be all Malls and business parks. The hotel is right next to somethign I have never seen before, a complex of about twenty business parks all in a row, just one after the other, on and on. They went on forever! It being Sunday, it was all completely deserted so we walked across just acres and acres of coifed, manicured grass in man-made shapes. After strolling around America's wild and vast landscape, this was very strange, to be walking around this manufactured approximation of nature that was almost just as big.
The best part was that Loona did not give a shit. She had a ball running around and playing in this shit.
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Look how exatly the same ammount of happy she is to roll around in this synthetic, re-created nature as she was to roll around in the great fields of Wyoming.
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As a matter of fact, I have to tell you, she had a better time running around in this shit than she did the whole trip! Like as soon as she saw these fake fields of rolled-out grass between the parking spaces, she said "Ah, now this is nature!" And who's going to argue with her? She's a dog. She IS nature. And apparently, as far as she's concerned, the snow-capped mountains of Utah and the virginal grass-plains of Nebraska can lift her fluffy tail and kiss her forever unwiped ass.
The punchline to the whole thing was that as we walked across one particular strip of grass, a jackrabbit trotted by and Loona chased it through the parking lot! I love that her first encounter with a wild animal on this trip was in a parking lot of some paper company in Des Moines. Sorry I didn't get a picture.
So that's really it, I'm afraid. Going to press on now. The next goal is Chicago. I heard there are some of our posters around town there so I'll try to go see one. If anyone knows where there is a Lucky Louie Poster in Chicago, please let me know.
LCK