To Peoria and Beyond!

Don’t let anyone ever tell you it’s easy to get the hell out of Philadelphia.

After the weeks of packing and finding new homes for most of my stuff, my younger brother Dan arrived to join in the muscle-straining, heavy-lifting fun.

Dan had signed up to be the chief communications officer in charge of in-truck music, co-navigator, and head of photography. I was particularly grateful for that last one, as you can’t take decent photographs of things while you are driving a truck, and we were sure to encounter interesting things along the way. Also, Dan is a gifted photographer who can always be relied upon to make sure his subjects are presented in the most flattering and complimentary light.

Good to know I had nothing to worry about.

(Photo Dan took when we were together in Seoul in 2024. Dan: Lookin’ good! Amy: Pure Muppet.)

At the start of this undertaking, with no idea how much baggage would be eventually going to greater Seattle, I’d reserved a 22-foot truck for a one-way cross-country drive. It sounded roomy enough. Next I started seriously eyeballing every passing truck around to get a decent idea of just how big the 22-foot truck I’d just rented actually would be. Online the truck is about 2-inches long, sometimes set in a box, over the words “22-foot rental truck.”

22-foot rental truck

Would you like to know the most-often-asked question online about the 22-foot rental truck, according to the internet? It is this: “How big is a 22 feet truck?” So clearly I was not the only one wondering about this.

My old pal Jarvis over in England, who recently moved house himself, took to referring to my summer undertaking as “The Big Stash.” And the apartment was finally starting to look different. There were empty shelves, patches of bare floor, and even some echo-y rooms. Junior the borrowed cat kept having to find a new favorite piece of furniture to sit on because things kept disappearing.

The dark-stained school desk (originally found by the side of the road) did not sell at our building’s multi-family yard sale even at the incredible bargain price of $2, so I ended up sending it home with Junior because he liked sitting on it so much. I reassured Junior it was his to keep, even if someone came by and offered me $3.

I was now able to start building piles of things to get an idea of how much stuff was going to go cross-country into storage outside of Seattle.

It turned out to be less than would call for the 22 feet of truck I’d reserved, so I ended up sizing down to a 12-foot truck. Which is less truck, but still a lot of truck.

Then we loaded the truck. If you are planning on doing this activity in the future, maximize the experience and aim for a hot, sticky, humid day with rain threatened, and make sure there are steps going down to the sidewalk, so even if you can load things onto a cart, you will still have to unload them from the cart to get them to the truck. You burn more calories that way and maximize this weight-bearing exercise opportunity.

The part of any packing which is always the hardest to me is the final stretch, when almost all of it is done, but there are still all these weeny annoying things left. The toiletries to fit into a suitcase, clothes to stuff somewhere, the food left in the fridge, still more garbage to take out, the last things to clean, or whatever. This is the stage I call Death By A Thousand Details, and it’s when your thus-far steely focus on the task at hand can easily falter. So many small bits, taking so many large bits of time!

And it never helps when it is very hot and you have already given away all of your fans.

This is why you should not listen to anyone who tries to tell you that it’s easy to get the hell out of Philadelphia. The Thousand Details alone will make you stay an entire extra day, which means another night sleeping on Paula’s sofa, as there is only one bed left in the almost-empty, echoing apartment and Brother Dan is sleeping there. But you’ve already slept two nights on Paula’s sofa, so now the pets living there, your old pal Junior and the dog Chola, have pretty much decided that you are one of them, so you will awaken on your very last morning at your apartment building to find you have company.

By the time you have finally cleared the last of the Details and thrown everything into the truck it is evening, it is raining, and your first stop on your long journey will be after an unimpressive 125 miles, at a motel in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Your final destination is still another 2800 miles away.

The Sleep-Inn of Carlisle was rather okay. It was the second motel we stopped at, as the first was full. I know, in Carlisle?

Carlisle to Pittsburgh

Breakfast was included in the room price, so we breakfasted in Carlisle on round waffles, round eggs, and round sausages.

Round food is a motel breakfast thing.

Some of you are right now thinking: “That there’s a pretty darned good breakfast!”

And some of you will wake up shortly from a dead faint, still feeling pangs of pure horror.

(Carlo, take deep breaths.)

(I do know my readers.)

The next stop had to be Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, because we were stopping to retrieve Dan’s stuff in storage there. I will just note that it was very hot and humid in Pittsburgh and the storage facility had no ventilation or air conditioning, and events conspired to slow our storage visit down to stasis, but there was a nice point where I sort of caved to the heat and stagnation of the moment, extracted a nice camp chair from our truck, set it up on the loading dock, and broke out the pretzels and seltzer water.

When you can’t make anything happen any faster or even at all, just settle in on the loading dock with your pretzels and seltzer.
Amy reading, sitting on the loading dock of the parking bay.

Eventually everything fell into place, or got loaded into the truck, and we were able to head to our evening engagement.

That was sleeping over at Suzanne’s new home in the Greenfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh, an area that is mostly up. Suzanne is the sister of Madeleine, my late friend, about whom many of you have heard; Suzanne was able to assist me and Dan on this trip with some particularly timely information, and I announced that Madeleine must be watching over us all.

Pittsburgh famously has a lot of up, and tends to be hills with houses perched in surprising and incredible places. “Well, that’s a mighty nice cliff,” someone in Pittsburgh observes, and shortly thereafter a 2-story cliffside house is available for habitation. Suzanne opted for a hilltop house, located at the apex of a steeply angled street. It is a lovely house.

Suzanne’s house has elevation, and with elevation comes a heck of a view.

Here is what the steeply angled street looks like from the truck cab on the descent:

Pittsburgh is just a sort of “Whoa!” place that way.

We had to wend our way a bit in the truck, as clean-up teams were on the streets to remove all the barriers and hay bales that mark the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix, the only (legal) vintage-car street race in the US, which had just concluded. You don’t have to know that the event is going to happen — the nonstop whine of vintage engines, like a swarm of gigantic wasps, can be heard across the city for days. Next we stopped at Pigeon Bagels in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, owned and run by several generations of a wonderful family from our old street there, the Taubes. Dan returned to the truck with a bag full of their wonderful warm chewy bagels, which lasted us a few days. Attention would-be truckers: Bagels travel well. https://pigeonbagels.com/

Pittsburgh to Peoria

Chomping bagels, we left Pittsburgh to cross some of West Virginia and head into Ohio, driving along route 80, which has no tolls and goes fast enough.

In Ohio we started seeing road signs for a destination neither of us had ever been to, a commercial destination which has something of a cult following.

I type here of the phenomenon of Buc-ee’s.

Buc-ee’s, and I am making this up entirely, probably started as one gas station flogging cheap gasoline in some deep Southern state, to which an increasingly whimsical array of products got added, eventually comprising a huge shopfloor crammed with stuffed animals, loud shirts, key chains, air-puffed crunchy snacks, air-puffed homey quilts, puffy-bun jumbo BBQ sandwiches . . . .

And pastries the size of professional basketball-players’ heads.

And overnight the lines to buy giant pastries named after animal body parts were out the flippin’ door, so they quickly opened four dozen more stores.

The Buc-ee’s mascot is this bucktoothed beaver who now adorns every type of garment, toy, snack, lip balm, and decor and garden ornament. People in the US regularly incorporate planned Buc-ee’s stops into their travel itineraries.

It’s a beaver with big teeth wearing a red cap with earholes.

The Buc-ee’s™ empire is notoriously protective of its Buc-ee’s™ beaver™ mascot™ in all its mascotty™ iterations, and Buc-ee’s™ HQ™ have sued other companies who dared to put anything remotely beaverish™ or Buc-ee-like™ on their merchandise or advertising.

Okay, this part here with numbers is all definitely true: There are now 56 Buc-ee’s™ in 13 states but only one in Ohio. But it’s right there on Route 80. And enthusiastically announcing the BBQ and cheap gasoline (it was exceedingly cheap, the lowest price I would pay across the entire US, at $3.35 /gallon), large signs™ started welcoming us when we were still some 50 miles away. So of course we stopped™ at Buc-ee’s™.

We got our cheap gasoline from one of the 40 on-site gas pumps, and also a BBQ sandwich each, but we bought none of the celebrated Buc-ees Beaver Nuggets™, even though I have many friends who are staunch in their enthusiasm for this particular crunchy snack. I read the entire Buc-ee’s™ Beaver™ Nuggets™ packet and just could not stomach the idea of something made of corn meal, corn syrup, sugar, and fat. I am sure they are delicious, really! No, I am back to making things up here.

We then headed westward to the end of Ohio, through the state of Indiana, and then to Peoria, Illinois in the dark and some rain, to another motel.

We ended up with rooms at another Sleep Inn; the Carlisle one had been pretty well-maintained with a cheerful staff and decent breakfast. But the Peoria version was a bit worn around the edges, with some areas of the building under visible repair, and an unenthusiastic staff and breakfast offerings. But it’s a place to sleep, and then in the morning you drink coffee and head out in your truck to Iowa.

A motel is a motel is a motel.

Peoria to Omaha

If this is sounding a bit: “We drove here, and then we drove through here, and next we drove there,” well, that is exactly what the driving part of a cross-country driving trip is like. You drive this bit, and then you aim for the next bit, and then you keep driving for a while, and then you do some driving, until you decide you have done enough driving. Then you find a motel, and flop down on yet another bed in yet another room to sleep. The next day you do it all over again, preceded by coffee, punctuated by snacks from gas stations, listening to fuzzy radio stations, and looking at the road.

Always refer to the useful signage along the way. Where are we? North of something called “Barkcamp.”

Of course it was not all dullness in the truck cab! Dan did his best to locate interesting radio stations. I demonstrated that my phone is wholly inadequate for broadcasting podcasts in the range of human hearing. Dan insisted that I allow him to graciously hand me a drink or a snack any time I was thirsty or hungry, so my eyes never had to stray from the road unfurling endlessly ahead of us. I also occasionally drifted the truck just enough to the right on the road to engage the noisy R-R-R-Rumble strips carved into the road edge for your safety and protection — the raucous sound punctuating the calm of the truck cabin serves as a nice pick-you-up if the driving starts to get a weeny bit tedious.

From Illinois we crossed over into Iowa, heading to visit Elizabeth and Jim in Des Moines, and hoping their local adult kids would stop by (they did). Elisabeth and I are old friends from college.

Des Moines is the capitol of Iowa, though it is not a terribly large city. Driving into Des Moines, we were sure this was a church, but we debated what sort of church it could be. Catholic? Eastern Orthodox?

Turns out this is the State Capitol building.

Elisabeth and Jim live in a fine old Victorian-style house in the heart of Des Moines. Dan, new to Iowa, was taken aback at how impressive and characterful the house was, but I’d been there before, and frankly you could say the same thing about Elisabeth and Jim. It was very lovely to catch up and share snacks, and before we departed we bestowed interesting gifts upon them all. Well, we had a truck full of interesting things.

Like this large lovely carved wooden pagoda from China, which Dan had kept in its original wooden case, and which now abides in the home of Elisabeth and Jim of Des Moines. Dan is a person of generosity.

We drove off westward with a slightly lighter and definitely much more stable truck.

Dan and I made sure we got this Happy Truckers selfie in the cabin of our Penske truck, in case the Penske Corporation would like to hire us for promotional purposes.

Next it’s on to Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington, which I think is the correct order — I will know for sure in time for the next exciting blog post of Westward Ha, The Big Stash, The Farewell Tour, and When A Motel Is Not Just A Motel.