For those avidly interested…

My wife and I made the trip from Arkansas to just south of the Illinois-Wisconsin border and back in one incredibly compressed trip lasting 26 hours. The whole process was made much easier by the fact that her vehicle has dual controls – two steering wheels, two brake pedals, two accelerators, etc. etc., you get the idea. (Now, never mind that one set of those controls is in the back in a tail gunner position…okay, okay, just kidding there.) So we didn’t have to do a Chinese fire drill for someone else to take the wheel. With only brief stops for gas, one five-or-six hour layover at a truck stop in a tiny little Illinois town (whose name I now can’t remember – Topica? Topeka? Tapioca? Kai Opaka?) for a nap, and about a half-hour stop on the return trip for a little bit of a “picnic” in the parking lot of a filling station, we were always on the move.

When visiting Illinois, you may, from time to time, notice corn.

Lots and lots of corn.

And lots of windmills! We saw this windmill farm between Dekalb and Byron (where we went to pick up the Avid), and every one of them was moving.

A slightly better view.

I tried tilting at them, but y’know, the government warns against SUVs tilting…

We caught this bizarre sight – a little oil derrick (and apparently a dormant one) in the middle of an Illinois cornfield – when we stopped on the way home for our “picnic.” Kinda poetic.

Cool, I could have my own town? (Otisburg? OTISBURG??!?)

I hear everyone saying “shaddup already, let’s have some hardware shots.” Here it is in the back of the Escape. That IBM tower is huge. And hugely heavy. I was challenging my blawg readers to find a name for it, but having actually picked it up and carried it, I may stick with my idea of calling it Colossus. If the name fits…

VTRs and speakers. (The back seat was folded down into expanded cargo space to accomodate all the audiovisual swag.) Those are some nice damn speakers too, and better decks than I expected.

The back of the main Avid breakout box module. The thing’s practically pre-wired – we just have to figure out where the other end of each hooks up.

Odds and sods. Yes, it really helps to have the Avid keyboard with the little symbols on it. (Believe it or not, the auction that started this whole mess and sent us on this trip was something that my wife found for me while eBay searching for an Avid keyboard. Well, I sure as hell now have an Avid keyboard. Is she good or what?)

We were behind “hiccups” here for a good deal of the trip back south from Byron. (Isn’t this the scientist lady from the Stargate universe?) What is it with vanity plates in Illinois? It seems like every third car tag is a vanity tag. Do they not charge extra for them like they do in Arkansas?

A town that really likes Woody Allen or a subtle hint that maybe we should consider not trying to make the whole trip in a day? You decide.

A bright sunset and a very dirty windshield on the way home in eastern Missouri. (I would have a picture or two of the St. Louis Arch, which we drove right past, but I didn’t have the camera at the ready when I should have.)
There’s more to tell, but it’ll have to wait until I meet the minimum requirements for consciousness and sentience, which, in all honestly, I probably don’t even some close to right now. Time to go lay down and let Othello purr me to sleep.