Truckin' Down I-74

Today's drive was not too long -- only about 600 km, but it was a difficult drive. I-74 runs basically in a west-east direction, but this portion of the Interstate really runs north-south. From Galesburg, past Bloomington,, through Champaign-Urbana to Indianapolis, the terrain is much more urban and thus much busier. There really isn't much to see, since the interstate by-passes downtown areas and the terrain is what I would call "boring". It's not flat, but it's certainly not mountainous -- not even hilly! The trees are fairly small and insignificant.


The ring road around Indianapolis is unbelievably torn up. Everywhere we looked, we saw gigantic machinery moving mountains and building overpasses. The lanes were shifted from one side to another and progress was slow. Once we left the ring road and connected with I-65, the road conditions improved, but the truck traffic amazed us. We have never seen so many trucks, and just to prove that we are not exaggerating, we took data. Over two intervals, we counted the large trucks heading north as we drove south. The average number of trucks we counted was 1 truck every 3 seconds. Honest!



As we neared Louisville, we faced rush hour traffic. I won't complain about the Port Mann slow downs again. It was brutal, but, with our trusty Susan and her pal Tom-Tom, we got through the central part of the city and even managed to fox trot our way across lanes in order to take the correct exit ramp leading to the motel that we had selected. Whew!





Tomorrow, we break up this travelling team. Brian will head out to see the sights of Louisville before he leaves early Saturday morning for a much faster trip home. I think he plans to visit the Louisville Slugger factory and to have a look at the home of the Kentucky Derby. I will head south and east to meet Sue in New Haven (I think it's about 40 minutes from here), and then on to family in Pine Knot.