Time has passed

And we have a house! However, it won't be ready for a week or so. So, Caity and I are shacking up in an Extended Stay Suite. A massive step up from the incredible dive we stayed at last night. Maybe it was the giant moth on the wall when we came in, or the broken lock (still worked?), or the sheets that gave Caitlin hives, or maybe and ultimately the cockroach I accidentally crushed when i moved the nightstand. That Rodeside Inn can get stuffed.

So. Not much happened Monday. We drove though some farms in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Tried and failed to find a ghost town in Illinois and just found a crazy place I wish I hadn't seen. Saw a few crushed houses, more crosses and abortion billboards. We stopped at a Bob Evans which I guess is like a western Bic's, so imagine Bickford's but where everything sits in a pool of oil. I'll never go back.

Driving by people and seeing the country you begin to understand its problems. Not all of them, obviously, but you're able to put things together. There's nothing there. We'd drive for hours which equals hundreds of miles and there would be nothing but chain restaurants. Not good ones, but things like Bob Evans and Cracker Barrel, where everything is microwaved. I know all I saw was highways and interstates, but everynow and then we'd get off to look for something and see a town or drive down a small road and rather than have smaller restaurants where things could be nice there is either those same places or nothing at all. For hours and hundreds of miles. So there's so few places to go and everything is so grotesquely prepared that it gets less and less hard to figure out the weight problem. Or at least understand. There's a whole lot of people with nowhere else to go.

And that's why they drive giant cars. I can assume a reliable and efficient Toyota Camry would be too tight and compact and uncomfortable. SUVs are huge and can house a huge man, or huge family of which I've seen many.

More tomorrow.