Well, we made it to Chicago before we got lost. Something about Ogden turning out from under us, and we ended up driving by a lot of places that said "taqueria" and other stuff in Spanish. Anyway, we ended up on Joliet Road for a while and drove past a big Martian where some woman who didn’t speak English took a picture of me and Rachel.

After Pontiac the road stayed just east of I-55 mostly, and it ran alongside an antique but seemingly operational row of telephone poles. Sometimes I veered away from the highway and into the rest of America, which is apparently filled with corn. Each time we got lost, though, we somehow turned up found, especially in time to eat lunch in Lexington (named, of course, for the battle). We also played on their brand new community playground and Rachel used the bathroom of the fire department, which in turn spent the day rotating its trucks.

We followed Route 66 pretty successfully through Springfield, where we examined the itinerary, time of day and weather and decided that we were sick of driving on the damn frontage road and getting lost in cornfields. So we got on the interstate and went to St. Louis, an area that has the fine accomplishment of becoming a bustling city in spite of the fact that nobody lives there. The streets are empty, the restaurants are empty, and all the signs that mark state roads are shaped like Missouri, which is just weird. We passed by the arch and argued over whether there are windows in it (there are), and then we rented a movie and fell asleep to it, except for me. I fell asleep late, late at night and woke up in the morning to find that, thanks to continental drift or something, Baker was sleeping about an inch from my face. And you don’t want to see Baker’s face while he’s sleeping. But I’m encroaching on Alex’s territory, so I’ll sign off.