Prairie Schooner - Day 2

Awake with the birds (Starlings?) at 6:30. Roll over, back to sleep. Pretty mushy bed that would otherwise ruin me after a week of use, but was great for one night. At breakfast we met Betsy from Oakland who was in town to help move her son from Bloomington to Virginia. Overall the Burr House was nice B&B experience. It wasn't cluttered with faux-Victorian trinkety crap on every flat surface, the owners were real people and not playing some theatrical part, and there was no overwrought backstory about the history of the structure. Said goodbye to Mary Ann and her granddaughter (mom and dad had seen Pearl Jam the night before at the United Center) and hit the road.

I'd have put a picture here to capture the drive from Bloomington to Indianapolis along I-74, but photographic technology has yet to be invented that can properly convey the comic vastness and utter geographical void that is eastern Illinois. Plenty windy out there too, by golly. There's some unyielding low-pressure sucker north and east of us that seems to never run out of juice, and it gave us not only a 40 MPH tailwind, but flash hail storms and bright blue sunshowers. Taking full advantage of Indiana's 70 MPH limit on the freeway, we rolled into the hotel about 2 . . . make that 3; Indy don't play that daylight saving time game. We met some of the family, whose journeys made our 650-mile (so far) effort seem silly, chatted for a while, and loped across the parking lot for dinner.

We liked the look of a place called Beef & Brew, but they fell under some weird (to me) law or policy that didn't allow anyone under 18 in the place no matter who they were accompanied by. The legal age is 21 but that didn't seem to be the issue. Maybe it was some odd provision of some draconian anti-smoking law. That's okay; there was another place across the street that was happy to take our money.

Seems like the atmosphere has stabilized, so I can stand down from watching the sky.