In the lap...

...of luxury. I'm sitting here in my humongous room at the Comfort Inn in Mishawaka, IN, sipping some OK cabernet, listening to Hearts of Space, and looking forward to tomorrow's drive that should be relatively free of traffic stress. I'll fill you in on all of these sources of delight, but I'll be brief since you may not find them as riveting as I do. (smile)

Item: In these two coast-to-coast trips I've reserved rooms ahead only when I knew (as at Yellowstone) that it was likely to be necessary. Otherwise I just drove in and never had a problem - until Scottsbluff a week ago, when hotel rooms suddenly became scarce. Tonight, after dinner and my final time zone change, I was nervous because I would be arriving near 9:00 instead of my usual 6:00. I called ahead but the clerk said there was no need for a reservation. When I arrived she put me in this fancy suite for under $90. Woo-hoo!

Item: I got the $9 cabernet at the liquor store next door as a compromise between their cheapest at $5 and the $51 bottle at the other end. My usual at home costs less and tastes better but at this price I'm not complaining. Out of a plastic hotel cup, no less.

Item: HOS is one of the shared pleasures Rae and I discovered back in 1999. She had come to the weekly program of "space music" years before through her music, folks like frequent HOS artist Brian Eno. I was also a longtime fan via a weekly broadcast on my DC classical station before they lost their marbles and then "recovered" by losing only their bearings - a rant I'll spare you here..

Item: Traffic brings me to today's canto of the odyssey:

After breakfast with Kristen and her girls at another Urbana dining favorite, amid cornfields north of town (not worth naming here but my table companions were wonderful), I continued a few miles north for a second attempt at the Chanute Air Museum in Rantoul, as I had arrived there last night five minutes after closing. It's an odd low-budget moth-eaten sort of museum that I suspect exists mainly for nostalgic USAF veterans, especially those who served at Chanute AFB before it closed in 1993. Boxy bare rooms show photos and a few artifacts of airmen's life on the base (bunks, kitchen, laundry, etc.).

Three rooms were more interesting. One is a photo gallery of Black fliers (trained elsewhere) and ground crewmen (trained at Chanute) that shows someone's passion for this part of military history before President Truman integrated the armed forces. One titled "Barnstormers, Wingwalkers, and Entrepreneurs" is crowded with small civilian planes of the 1920s and 1930s, the only non-military aircraft I saw except for a Kitty Hawk replica in the hangar. The third is equally crowded with Frasca Trainers; you get this photo because Chanute is where my brother Jack learned to run flight simulators, though those he showed me at his workplace in Goldsboro, NC, in 1966 were more elaborate Link trainers on hydraulic stilts that tilted the cockpit when the pilot banked the "aircraft" and provided turbulence when appropriate. (I crashed the fighter jet every time without even getting off the runway.)

From the museum building I went into the hanger and the outside exhibit. I confess that I find military hardware disturbing and stopped taking photos after a while. Among the aircraft of all types and eras since 1940, my favorites were three to whose civilian counterparts I feel some sort of connection: the famous DC-3 tail-dragger that was still used by commercial airlines when I was a child - its military version was known as the "Gooney Bird"; the Grumman Goose, resembling the flying boat that was a romantic icon of my childhood as the Pan Am Clipper; and especially the Douglas DC-6B Constellation with its triple tail, whose military version you see here with the flying boat behind it. I saw a family friend fly into Midway on Constellations many times when it was Chicago's main airport, years before commercial jets appeared.

Alas, many of the planes on display suffered from peeling paint, holes in the skin, flat tires, and other signs of decay. Uncomfortable or not, I wish they had the funds to show the aircraft to best advantage as they are at the two National Air and Space Museum sites in Washington and nearby Chantilly, VA.

PS. The large plane I photographed yesterday isn't a bomber after all: it's a C-97 Stratofreighter from the 1940s, based on the B-50 bomber but used as a tanker, freight carrier, and command post until as recently as the Vietnam War.

From Rantoul I continued straight north in bright sunlight to visit my friend and former colleague Doug in a suburb west of Chicago, then downtown in hopes of connecting with another friend and former colleague. This failed for lack of a phone number, just as happened with one of my Iowa City meetings. It's amazing how cell phones have transformed our lives and yet can become barriers to communication no matter how carefully we plan and how far we travel to meet someone. (End of that rant, sorry.)

Then I headed for Munster, IN, in the south suburbs to revisit my college friend Mike, whom I saw on the trip west in May. I told the GPS to avoid freeways so I could sightsee, and got far more than I bargained for! Chatty Kathy steered me to the Lake Shore Drive as I hoped but I found all entrances blocked by police. President Obama was in town, as you saw in the news, and apparently the Secret Service decided to move him down a major artery in rush hour. Smart.

So instead I found myself on a familiar old commuting route from when I worked on Cermak Road: South Parkway (I learned today that it's been Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive since 1968, five years after I last worked there) to South Chicago St. to Stony Island Ave. Then it got weird; instead of getting on the Skyway I found myself zooming along for miles at whatever speed I wished on empty roads out in the back of beyond. I have no idea where I was and it made me nervous to be in some sort of William Gibson world.

Eventually I found my way to the Indiana suburbs and dinner with Mike the rabbi, who to my delight is active in hospice work along with a large part of his congregation. Like others I have known, I've been a huge fan of hospice since I experienced the Cape Cod Hospice's compassionate work with Rachel and later benefited directly from it in DC. I'm fortunate to have friends like Mike and Sigrid S - and not just for their free professional counseling.

So around 6 p.m. I rejoined Chicago rush hour traffic - until I exited the Kingery Expressway onto the Indiana Toll Road. Suddenly I was flying along a lightly-traveled expressway that, with its sisters in Ohio and Pennsylvania will take me almost the entire way to my next stop in eastern Pennsylvania sometime early Saturday. Luxury indeed.

(Posted Thursday after midnight)