Day 67 -- Van Buren, Ohio to Granger, Indiana -- 200 Miles

From one of my favorite driving songs by Arlo Guthrie:

Sail with me into the unknown void that has no end

Swept along the open road that don't seem to begin

Come with me and love me, babe I may be back again

Meantime I'll keep sailing down my highway in the wind

Today our main goal, as far as we ever have a main goal, was to drive as much of the Lincoln Highway as possible as it meandered west across the western half of the state of Ohio and eastern part of Indiana. This turned out to be pretty difficult. While you could drive the old alignment once in awhile, all too often Interstate 30 would chop the vintage pavement in two as it sailed on its way, oblivious to the fact that it just severed a piece of history. To make matters worse, the state of Ohio, as well as the state of Indiana, don't much care if you are able to assemble the broken pieces into a continuous journey, or not.

As some of you probably know by now, since I occasionally ramble on about it, the Lincoln Highway was the country's first attempt at stringing together the disparate chunks of muddy farm roads, and widely-spaced downtown streets of dozens of different villages from one end of the country to the other. Starting amidst the hustle and bustle of Times Square in New York, and finishing in the tranquil seaside serenity of Lincoln Park in San Francisco, the Father of ALL interstate highways attempted to bisect the country, ocean to ocean, starting in 1913. At least, that's what the promoters were telling people.

In reality, though things started coming together in 1913, it would be years before the Lincoln, named for our 16th President, would become a physical reality from coast to coast. Still, by 1915 the Lincoln Highway Association had a guidebook to help folks find their way across the maze of wandering farm roads. And you could get a copy of an Official Automobile Blue Book that showed each and every road from your city of residence to your destination, assuming you acquired the correct set of volumes. The Blue Book showed you every road to travel, every turn to make, every rail crossing or landmark of which you needed to be aware, and posted the mileage for each leg of that day's travel.

Since we always avoid the so called, Blue Highways, we tried mightily to stay on the Lincoln, but it really took some doing. Occasionally it would wander diagonally across Interstate 30 and announce its presence, but most times we had to try and guess just which side of Route 30 the old Lincoln was coursing at any given mile post.

As we were cruising this morning, I suddenly remembered that the National Studebaker Museum was in Studebaker's home town of South Bend, Indiana. Thanks to Concetta's magic IPhone, we learned immediately that South Bend was only about 35 miles northwest of our then location. Naturally, this called for a change of plans. We had been headed to the vicinity of Chicago, but a flip of the turn indicator and we were off and running away from the Lincoln Highway and toward South Bend, a town near the vicinity of the Indiana/Michigan border.

Our camp tonight is in a KOA in the town of Granger, about 15 miles from South Bend. Tomorrow we plan to visit the Studebaker Museum (and hope they have parking), and then we'll continue toward Chicago and the northwest. Our camp hosts tonight are a Swiss couple who speak four languages apiece, Swiss, German, French, and English. I've done quite a bit of talking to the husband about the quality of camps in general, and KOA camps in specific. He's a very down-to-earth individual and I instantly liked him. Finally, I had someone to complain to about the way camps nowadays fill up the majority of their spaces with permanent (or seasonally permanent) residents sporting all kinds of "junk" in their spaces, from picket fences to incredible things like spare rooms built onto their rigs.

Filling up your park with permanent or semi-permanent residents means that sometimes you have no room for folks traveling through. And much of the time, depending on what month you're traveling, there might not be any actual campers present in these long-term setups. In our camp last night, I would venture to say that of the 350 sites available, only about a dozen or so were ready to accept short-term, or overnight guests. The rest were unavailable even though few of the campers were actually present.

But enough of my complaints. I just got back from the camp ice cream parlor where I scored two scoops of gelato, one vanilla, one chocolate, with chocolate sauce and a cherry on top. Thankfully, I always save a small amount of coffee from the ten cups we make at breakfast, so I had myself a veritable feast. Sorry I didn't photograph it so you could see how yummy it was.

So there you have it. Tomorrow we continue our journey west, though after Chicago it will be a lot more north mixed with west. We're looking forward to getting a little further north in hopes of finding somewhat cooler temperatures, as we expect that summer will be landing on us in force pretty soon. We even had to run the air conditioner this afternoon when the sun was still shining on the side of the rig. We hope that you, too, get to head for the high lonesome this summer. Be careful out there, and we wish you Happy Travels!