Sunday, July 05, 2009

Day 20: Effingham, IL to Greenville, IL

While the distance from Effingham to St Louis is only a little over a hundred miles, we wanted to make sure we could arrive in St Louis while there was still plenty of daylight left. Looking over the map, we figured our only option was Greenville, since Pocahontas looked too small and Highland was a little too close. Plus, there'd be another section where US-40 was on I-70, so we'd need to navigate rural roads in order to find our way. Greenville had also been described to us as being "like a Norman Rockwell painting" so we were excited to maybe have something interesting to see.

There wasn't anything interesting to see. After a brief detour around construction, we got on a long stretch of straight road. Traffic was light, the ground was flat, and the wind didn't blow too hard. Occasionally, we saw an old oil well, chugging along slowly.

Several hours in, we turned about 45 degrees. We were so excited, we took a picture.

Only to then have more flat, straight nothing.

Eventually we arrived at Greenville and checked into the Super 8. Rather than have dinner nearby, we decided to ride the bike into town and wander around. We locked it up at the Police Station, where we were informed that we were unlikely to find anything open on a Sunday evening.

While wandering, we discovered that "like a Norman Rockwell painting" actually meant that Norman Rockwell scenes were painted on all the walls.

After grabbing some cookies at the Subway, which was the only place open, we rode back to the hotel and grabbed dinner at the Red Apple Restaurant. The food was nothing special, and the service was similar, but it was nice to not eat at a chain restaurant. After grabbing dessert ice cream at the gas station, we went to bed, hoping to get an early start tomorrow morning.

| posted at: 09:07 | permanent link and comments

You can view more entries using the archive links to your left or by looking at our index!