Roadtrip to NYC: Davenport, IA to Youngstown, OH
578 miles, via Chicago, IL. Short day that was supposed to have a nice long stop in Chicago
Day 5 (well, day 4 on the road) brings us revived after a full day's stop in Iowa. We needed it, too, although in retrospect, if we had no need to stop in Davenport, we could have made Chicago more of a focal point. As it was, we were supposed to spend a half-day there, but a last-minute call from Joel's law school, Hofstra, informed us that we really should be there ASAP, forcing us to abbreviate our time there.
We mucked through I-84, which had both horrible construction and a horrible toll collection system that forced us to slow down every few miles to pay a toll (rather than a unified single-entry-exit system in every other road we used). Lunch was with Eric from Ars Technica, complete with a nickel tour of NW Chicago. It's a different kind of urban east of the Mississippi, and it was fascinating. Downtown Chicago is built up more than Los Angeles is, it feels second only to New York City as far as the American cities with Really Tall Buildings go. A quick drive down Lakeshore Drive, between downtown and the coast of Lake Michigan, only give us a brief taste of it (and nasty traffic). Perhaps in the future two or three full days in Chicago can be arranged, if we can be pulled away from Manhattan...
Breaking out of Chicago onto I-80/I-90 East reveals a well-run section of turnpike through both Indiana and Ohio. It's cheap, too; we paid something like $4 or $6 to cross Indiana and a similar fee to cross Ohio. We detoured north about 5 miles to cross the Michigan state line just for kicks, then headed back to I-80. Cornfields and cornsnakes mark Indiana, along with the massive headquarters of Tire Rack in South Bend. The greenery since Iowa feels more rich than it did in the midwest, and we enjoy it at sane speeds thanks to a heavy state police presence in Indiana. (the presence is somewhat less in Ohio, but I think we saw as many state troopers in ~170 miles of Indiana as we did in 400+ miles of Kansas. Yikes!).
Instead of stopping in Cleveland, we push another 70 miles to Youngstown, because we really have no particular reason to stop in Cleveland aside from the fact that we're not dumb enough to cross into Pennsylvania and New York in a single day. We feel pretty good after stopping at one of the many "travel plazas" off of I-80 and only our second fast food meal of the trip and as it turns out, Youngstown is the last decently sized down directly off of I-80 for a while. <sarcasm>The Super 8 we use seems to be a decent upgrade over the Motel 6 we had in Nevada-- they at least have free shampoo, not just soap!</sarcasm>
