In an ideal world, I'd be driving US 20 end to end, then looping down and returning east on US 6. Well, this isn't an ideal world. To cover 6 and 20 in two one-week road trips, with time for sightseeing and some important side trips, I'm splitting the routes into three parts. Everything east of Chicago will be driven on weekends. On this trip, I'm driving 20 west from Chicago to I-15, just west of Yellowstone National Park, then zipping back to Denver and returning on 6 from Denver to Chicago. Then around Labor Day, I'll fly to Denver and drive the western leg. (Steve -- any problems with my taking the week of August 28?)
This marks the 10th anniversary, almost to the week, of my first "road" trip. While idly flipping through a map on a visit to my father, I had noticed that only five roads go coast-to-coast: Interstates 10, 80 and 90, and US Routes 20 and 30. I decided to drive 20 west, then 30 east, to see what I'd pass through along the way. The rest is history. As for this trip, since I've now driven the entire stretch from Duanesburg, NY west to Dubuque, Iowa, I'll pretend I did it all on this trip and start the narrative in upstate New York...
Between Duanesburg and Geneva, New York, a distance of about 175 miles, US 20 is a virtual museum of the pre-Interstate roadside. Until the New York Thruway was constructed about 10 miles to the north, US 20 was the main route west from New England. Old motels and long-abandoned tourist cabins still line the road; in one spot, a huge tepee still sells Indian-themed souvenirs as it has for at least forty years. At Richfield Springs, I almost turned south to Cooperstown from force of habit.
The history kicks in around Seneca Falls, which is known as the birthplace of the women's rights movement. Alas, one of the best photo opportunities has been destroyed: 10 years ago, the sign marking the site of the first women's rights convention stood in front of a laundromat! Didn't revisit the National Women's Hall of Fame, down the street from the former Women's Rights Laundromat, but as of a few years ago its most prominent sponsor was Ortho, maker of birth control pills. (Hey, at least it wasn't Philip Morris...) Waterloo, the next town along the road, claims to be the birthplace of Memorial Day, which has been celebrated there since the 1860s.
West of Geneva, the most noteworthy stop is a rundown-looking shop on the north side of the road: Calhoun's Books, which contains thousands of used books and tens of thousands of postcards for sale at quite reasonable prices. 20 passes well south of both Syracuse and Rochester, and a few miles south of Palmyra, birthplace of Mormonism. As one who tends to believe there's an extra M in Mormons, I didn't stop to see the hill where Joseph Smith supposedly received his allegedly divine prophecies. 20 continues almost to Buffalo before turning sharply southwest toward Pennsylvania. This is grape country, with vines lining the side of the road.
20 then continues through Erie, Pennsylvania, home to more War of 1812 monuments than anywhere else on earth. The locals seem to have a little trouble with spelling and reality, though: they refer to prefabricated restaurants as "dinors," and on my earlier trip through I passed a house whose occupant proudly proclaimed his property a "Communist Free Zone." Once in Ohio, 20 becomes the main shopping drag of a dozen towns east of Cleveland --- it was almost enough to drive me back to the Interstate.
Nearing Cleveland, 20 is James A. Garfield country. One of the men who gave Ohio the nickname "Cradle of Mediocre Republican Presidents" lived along 20 in Mentor, 25 miles east of Cleveland, and is buried in Lake View Cemetery, also along 20. Garfield's grave is marked by a 180' tower, 50'in diameter, with Tiffany stained-glass windows and a balcony with a view of downtown Cleveland. Those Ohioans really love their dead Presidents...
Ray Chapman, the only major leaguer ever killed by a pitched ball, is also buried in Lakeview Cemetery -- in a touching gesture, someone left a bat, ball, glove and Indians schedule on his headstone.
West of Cleveland, there's almost nothing of interest along the road for another 200 miles. The next significant stop, the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana, is most noteworthy for its ideology: somehow every Republican president in the past 50 years has been named its Man of the Year, and at the height of the Vietnam War its highest honor went to John Wayne and a stream of hawkish generals. Meanwhile Paul Robeson, who was the best college football player in America before becoming One of Those Radical Agitators, was excluded until the mid-1990s. If baseball's curse is starry-eyed writers who use the game as a metaphor for America, football's curse is the combat fantasies of flatulent gasbags. No wonder Rush Limbaugh wants to broadcast Monday Night Football...
Further west, 20 follows the curve of Lake Michigan past the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore to the Gary-Whiting-Hammond area, Indiana's answer to Elizabeth, New Jersey. The steel mills whose soot once blotted out the sun are now closed, but Amoco's mile-long refinery which straddles both sides of the route at Whiting remains a particularly fragrant eyesore. Hammond and Gary have turned to floating casinos in an attempt to bring some life back to their waterfronts, but the only other new construction I noticed was a series of shiny new gas stations for the convenience of visiting Chicagoans. Yes sir, talk about economic redevelopment...
20 follows 95th Street across Chicago, then turns northwest. Past O'Hare Airport, I noticed at least 10 miles of suburbs which weren't there 10 years ago. One of the highlights of my previous trip was Freeport, where I arrived just in time for the town's Memorial Day parade: high school marching bands, Miss Freeport, Miss Black Freeport, floats, Shriners in their little carts. This time I had to settle for the memorial honoring the Lincoln-Douglas debate which took place here. By the time I reached Galena, an old lead-mining town in which the historic buildings now house all manner of cutesy shops, it was too dark to take pictures, so I stopped for the night.
Tomorrow: IOWA! Farms, farm toys, a Field of Dreams, and the redundant Boondocks USA, followed by a 300-mile detour for free ice water...
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