Day 2

The end of a full day of driving finds me at an inn in Indiana.  I drove for roughly 11 hours and passed through 2.5 states.  As an agriculture person, I notice the land, plants and animals more than I do the architecture and the like.  Driving across so much land, you notice changes.

When I started driving through Missouri, it mostly resembled Oklahoma.  It seemed to have more variety of agriculture, fewer cattle and wheat, more fields with other crops or livestock.  The big change was the rocks in the landscape, poking out as if the land there were truly rock and the soil and vegetation were a dressing.  The first rocks I really noticed emerged from the side of a small hill.  They were huge, at least 4 feet tall, disappearing into the hill behind them.  they looked like they had been worn smooth by centuries, or millennia, of winds blowing across them, shaping the edges into a curving tiers rather than harsh edged layers, which is what I found as I continued east.  The land became more jagged, as if the exposed rock faces were more and more recent.

I crossed into Illinois through St. Louis.  I didn't see much of the city, but I loved what I did see.  Soaring church steeples, old steel bridges and renovated factories all vied for attention as I whipped through on the interstate, not to mention the Arch.  It would be nice to be able to go back and spend some more time exploring if the opportunity presents itself in the future.

Illinois has corn.  I drove through and was overwhelmed by the seemingly endless fields of corn and soy beans.  For those not familiar with the practice, soy beans are rotated with corn to help try to increase soil quality because corn is so demanding of soil nutrients.  The fields were not large as such things are measured, but every mostly flat piece of land was growing one or the other of those two crops.  There were very few trees or other plants growing, there were even some 'wild' corn plants growing in the median.

The change from Illinois to Indiana was subtle.  There was still lots of corn and soy beans growing, but there were other things too.  What I noticed most were the trees.  There were trees again, occasionally thick enough to hide the large fields behind them.  The number of fields being grown in Indiana seems to be fewer, but the scale seems larger.  The fields in Indiana are any where from 2 to 4 times bigger than what I saw in Illinois.  There are also more fields with signs indicating that they are testing new varieties of hybrids.  Indiana seems to have a more industrialized agriculture base than Illinois.

So, tonight finds me hanging my hat at an in somewhere in Indiana.  I hope to reach my parents' home in Virginia some time tomorrow.