July 26, Day 11: Elkhart Indiana

• Miles Today: 568
• Miles Total: 2784
• Weather: Warm and clear, 88F in Joliet Illinois
• Roads: Lots of construction through Chicago, accident on Indiana Toll Road. Huge delays. Lots of tolls.
• Today’s Theme Song: “Give Me Forty Acres” by the Willis Brothers
• Rodgerism: “I just touched my uvula!”  (while discussing gag-reflex.)
• Lesson: Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights make a left.

 

Huge travel day. One of the biggest of the trip. No (intentional) site-seeing. We didn’t need the forty acres we expected to exit the Pollards’ cul-de-sac, but we got to make more than a few creative turns before the day was over.

 

The St. Croix river meets the Mississippi near Hastings. You can’t tell from this photo, but there is a definite line where the clean and clear St. Croix flows into the muddy Mississippi just beyond the bridge.

 

I have no idea why the GPS thought that highway 10 through Wisconsin was a faster route than the interstate, but I am glad that it did. It was a beautiful drive through rolling corn fields with big red barns and hardwood forests. I was the only one awake for that couple of hours, so everyone else has to rely on these through-the-windshield shots.

 

I have never been through Chicago without a major traffic delay, so I chose to add a half-hour to the route just to get around the western part of the Metro area by going all the way down to I-80, but it still took over two hours just to get through Joliet due to one narrow lane under a bridge causing all that delay. The local radio traffic reports mentioned what a terrible commute it was becoming, yet the Garmin GPS traffic report still showed green all the way through the mess.

 

Once into Indiana, I realized that Illinois spent their toll money on road maintenance and not traffic updates, while Indiana did the opposite. Damaged and rutted roads, but spot-on traffic reports on the GPS, right down to the exact location and number of emergency vehicles on the scene. (We don’t get that much detail in Seattle). Total delays cost us about 3 hours of extra driving by the time we got through it all.

 

 

Tonight was an experiment. We had no reservations and were just planning on driving as far as we could, and possibly camp out at a Walmart. We made it as far as Elkhart Indiana, and tried to find the Walmart promised by the Exit Now Guide. We couldn’t find it, so tried the Points of Interest in the GPS. The nearest one it found was about eight miles away, taking us through every section of Elkhart. If it was daylight it would have been a good tour. The Walmart we found was definitely not the one the Exit Now Guide would have suggested for RV’ers. I got online with my 3G-modem and googled the Walmarts in the area. It found one on “Country Road #6” in about the area we left the toll-road, so we put that into the GPS, but it couldn’t find even the road. I checked the Walmart website, and it showed the same address as google. The manager of this store told me how to get to the one we sought (pretty much back where we got off of the toll-road) and it was on county road #6, not country road #6. One more look at walmart.com and google still incorrectly showed country road, which of course the GPS could not find. It did find county road #6 (but not the address of that store) so we eventually found the place we were looking for, and called it a night at about midnight. That’s why no blog update.

 

 

Today’s lesson is some GPS trivia. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore claimed to have “[taken] the initiative in creating the internet.” While that is now everyone’s favorite Al Gore joke, at the time it sounded more impressive to young voters than helping to make the Global Positioning System more available to consumers, as it was not in wide consumer use before 1998.