Crescent Gets A Colonic in Romeoville

The solemn oath of every automobile owner: I will change the oil and the filters every 3,000 miles. Crescent, currently my home and sole major possession, my divinely serene conveyance, had gone from 11,000 to 14,000 miles since I bought her in Portland. Time for a service call. Jiffy Lube turned out to be ten minutes drive from our hotel.

The young mechanics on duty wondered why I was taking photographs. I told them about my on-line journal, and they asked for the web site address, which I cheerfully provided. I love the almost universal friendliness to strangers, even somewhat strange strangers like myself, that I encounter in the Midwest.

We waited in the shade, and soon made the acquaintance of a series of green beetles less than a quarter inch long. Bernie made a poem for them.

Soft is the heart of a small green bug.
Can you imagine how tiny it must be?

We saw a kind of daisy neither of us had ever seen before.

Feeling somewhat rejuvenated ourselves knowing the van's bowels were renewed, we glided out onto Highway 80, crossed into and through Indiana, and rolled through most of Ohio before we slept.

Big prairie skies over miles of farmland

Cornfields and red barns in rhythmic repetition

Late afternoon in the Buckeye State

Dusk in Sandusky, Ohio, on Lake Erie, where we stopped for dinner

We rolled through Cleveland after nightfall, enthralled by the totally lit up skyscrapers that contrasted so radically with the surrounding countryside. Sixty miles later, we found rest at the Ho Hum Motel, straight out the 'fifties, complete with neon, in Ashtabula, a small town on the shores of Lake Erie.