From the Midwest to the Northeast...

recently, during the Memorial Day (a US Holiday) Weekend, i took a road trip across the US Midwest to the Northeast (ah! so what?! do i think i'm the President of the United States and everyone is so interested to hear about my stupid trips over the roads east and west?!)

well, my companions were a friend of mine from college and a couple of his pals.
my friend lives at Minneapolis - one of the Twin Cities (the other twin is St. Paul) of Minnesota, the North Star State.
they three came by bus to Chicago (ya, that's the city where i find myself of late!) friday midnight (it's a seven and half hr drive from M.polis to Chi-town).

early next morning, we took a cab and went to the Chicago Union station to catch the bus to Cleveland (Ohio's largest city). the bus was late. driver was a lazy fellow (drove it like a bullock cart!). the hi-tech buses of Chennai-Madurai Yohalakshmi Travels (oh yeah, semi-sleeper seats!) are way better than the buses of the States!!

as the bus crawled its way out of Chicagoland (crazy name, isn't it? 'Greater Chicago' - something on the lines of Greater London - would've been much better.), i slept off now and then. one guy was reading 'The Odessa File' (well, it's a Forsyth. so i'd've read it long back). others were listening to their iPods. i too had put a book in my backpack (a PG Wodehouse, of course!). but i was more interested in looking at the landscape of the American Midwest.

lot of green farmhouses ... a farmer wearing peasant clothes and cap, going around on his tractor in a plantation that looked like a vineyard (hmm, don't ask me what he was doing with a tractor in a vineyard! it looked so classic that such questions never arose in my mind).....scenes that held my undivided interest....'no need for that Wodehouse to come out of the backpack....i AM entertained!'

the landscape of the Midwest is mostly farmlands interspersed with small forests. it's odd actually. in many places, they have a mini dense forest standing right at the center of a vast farmland! anyone see any reason behind that?

and of course, the Midwest is famous for its Great Lakes. our route from Chicago to Cleveland and then from there to further Northeast was along the shores of the Lake Erie. but i din't get to see that lake as it was a little bit far from the road and there were trees and stuff in-between.
but on our way back (that's after three days), when the vehicle climbed a high road, i could see it.

it was almost evening. sunset. and what a scene it was!
on full moon nights, from Chennai's (oh, sweet Chennai!'s) seashores, i used to gaze at the white highway paved by the moon on the pitch-black waters of the Bay of Bengal (many a time, i've wanted to take a boat and row my way down that highway to the horizon).
this was the first time i saw a sunlit water-highway! the lake is so huge like an ocean (it must be, since it is designated as a Great Lake!) and this goddamn setting sun had painted a road on that ocean!
i murmured 'sunlit highway'.
the guys din't mind, thankfully.

so we reached Cleveland city center by evening. we took the train to the airport (our rental car was booked at the airport). got the car and started on the other half of the journey. it was a TATA Safari-like car. my friend drove. i sat in the front reading the maps for him. we traversed Ohio, zigzagged through western Pennsylvania (now that is one heck of a heavily wooded and mountainous region) and entered upstate New York (ya, the freakin' Empire State, baby!).

we ate at restaurants by the road. reached the village of Niagara Falls (yes, there is a village by that name! as a matter of fact, there are two such villages, although the one on the Canadian side can be called as a town or a city. the Canadians have developed their side of the falls area into an entertainment center - casinos etc.) around midnight. we went directly to the falls and had a night view of the thing. they had put on colorful lights. it looked...colorful (strangely i don't 'feel' any other adjective to qualify it).

then we dropped the other two guys at the hotel and ventured out into the aging night in search of good clubs to hang out (oh, what a noble mission!). my friend had looked up some clubs over the net (methodical guy!) and he had some addresses. the only thing was we could not find any damn one of 'em! we drove around upstate New York here, there, everywhere....

thick forests, long winding highways, roadside streams...and all of these in the eerie hours of the dark night! i had a map to read and whenever we lost our way, we somehow managed to find our way back to some road on that map. but a huge map it was! and we frequently did get out of it!

and imagine how you would feel when suddenly fog engulfs your car on an almost exit-less highway cutting into the woods. then suddenly, you notice your fuel indicator is nearing empty!

luckily at last there was an exit in that damned stretch of highway that led onto a straight road to a village. my friend parked the car near a bar on that road, and yours truly went inside the bar to ask for directions to any nearby gas stations. there were two men and a lady (all of 'em were tight like owls and the woman looked like a character straight out of the Evil Dead movies!). but they were kind and they told me how to get to the gas station.

we drove further down the road, found the gas station, filled our tank and then got going again. it was almost 3.45 am in the morning and we drove through different woodlands and moody roads to find our way back to our hotel. it was already morning by the time we reached the hotel.

we had had an amazing road tour of upstate New York under the North American moon!

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