Man and Superman

Metropolis, Illinois — 4256.7 miles

Back on Central time at last.

The rain started coming down again a few minutes before I hit Elizabethtown; I had the absurd idea that I'd be safer in a small town than on the big, nasty highway. Well, E-town isn't that small — 23,000 people or so — and after hiding out at a bank drive-thru for a few minutes (well, it was a branch of my bank, and I did use the ATM in the process), I pressed ahead through the storm, which let up after about an hour or so.

One thing I did notice: all the church parking lots were full, storm or no storm, for the next 50 or 60 miles.

US 62 near Rosine, Kentucky, birthplace of Bill Monroe, is marked "Blue Moon of Kentucky Highway," which seems only reasonable. Farther west, in Central City, the road is labeled "Everly Brothers Boulevard," for the same sort of reason. I pulled into Central City for lunch, and chatted up a trio of soldiers, probably Reservists doing their one weekend a month (which would explain the mind-jarring combination of sneakers and camo on one of them). They were in a plenty jaunty mood; I mentioned my own years in fatigues, and one of them said, "It's a pleasure to serve." Gotta love those Kentucky boys. (And the girls, too: while billboards near Paducah offered possible counterevidence, what I see makes me believe that there are no unattractive women anywhere in Kentucky. Must be a state law or something. West of Beaver Dam I spotted a mailbox with the name "Cornett"; I didn't stop to ask, but you never know, or at least I don't.)

Sign at Tradewater Taxidermy: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. Cute.

When I was in Pennsylvania however many days ago, I crossed a bridge from West Trenton Avenue in Morrisville to Calhoun Street in Trenton, New Jersey. The bridge is one of those narrow jobs with lanes about this wide and no actual pavement: it's all steel plates, and they play hell with my nerves. US 45 has something similar between Paducah, Kentucky and Brookport, Illinois, with one minor exception: the Ohio River is about three times as wide as the Delaware, so my synapses endured roughly 27 times as much jangling.

I am just under 600 miles from home at this point; were this the beginning of the trip, I'd try to do it in one day, but right now I'm suffering from Kryptonite poisoning or something.

Actually, I did pay a visit to the Super Museum in downtown Metropolis, across from the actual statue of the Man of Steel Bronze, where I was reminded that Lois Lane and Supergirl were plenty hot. According to local lore, the Chamber of Commerce used to hand out Kryptonite samples to visiting children, but DC put a stop to that, and I assume it's not because they assumed the kids would be visiting planets with different-colored suns.

Posted at 5:03 PM to World Tour '05