Day 17

It wasn't good. To be kind, it was swollen and the purple of a deep and sullen bruise. To be more accurate, it was *grossly* swollen, and contained the varied shades of blue and purple that shouldn't occur in nature. I wasn't going to touch it, and it ought to be a felony in all fifty states to call that thing a blueberry. There was nothing I could put next to it to provide a sense of scale, but my family will attest that blueberries should be wild, small and sweet - not morbidly obese, mushy and bland like that failure of nuclear medicine that stared back at me from my breakfast bowl. We pushed off at 7:10 AM, well before dawn, and immediately encountered snowplows on the highway getting ready for testy weather that's hopefully more than a day behind us. We hit rush hour traffic south of Chicago but things were still flowing nicely. We got two different kinds of "welcome" to the midwest - the first was an eagle soaring over one of the bridges we crossed and just as he dipped his wings and intersected the horizon of the treeline the sun appeared at that very spot, very cool. The second welcome was midwest construction zones, with transitions so bad that at one point I caught enough air to make Jim grab his grips a little harder as he followed behind me. We hit Indiana by 8:30 and marveled at how many different and non-compatible toll systems the U.S. still has in place. That state flew by pretty quickly, and pretty soon we were in Elkhart, Indiana, which is near and dear to any toy owner - that whole region is packed with companies that manufacture RVs, pontoon boats, trailers, coolers, and just about any component that goes into them. It would be a super cool place to work if it wasn't such a super cold place to live. I suppose on the upside it has the "RV Hall of Fame", so, there's that. We continued on past Fort Wayne, which made me think of Susan, and into Ohio, which seems to be in peak foliage. Having left just before peak over two weeks ago it was nice to catch some color before it's all gone. The poplars were bare, the maples were putting on a show, and the oaks were stubbornly holding onto both their green and their leaves, as if hard heads make for hard woods. The smell of rotten leaves brought back a lot of memories of deer seasons past. Somewhere along the way we passed by Duct Tape World Headquarters, which I thought was neat. Is there a WD-40 World Headquarters? Because with those two things, you ought to be able to fix just about anything... Happy to be back in the Eastern Time Zone, we both remarked that across the entire country we hadn't seen people floating in the left lane, except in the northeast... We also saw construction zones all across the south and west where the "Left Lane Closed in 1/2 Mile" sign meant everyone pulled over immediately and nobody tried to douche their way to the front of the line and pull over at the last minute. We were stunned. But one thing that is the same countrywide is that semi trucks outnumber automobiles on our major highways, and by a healthy margin. Pulling a 12-hour day we made about 600 miles of headway across 5 states, and came to rest shortly after dusk in Buffalo, NY, somewhat frozen by the 40-degree temps and damp conditions. By the latest forecast, if we depart by 7 AM tomorrow we should be able to miss most of the rain tomorrow. Fingers crossed - that's the excitment that makes this Day 17 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour! Onward and upward.

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