Saturday, July 16 - NO PROBLEMS TODAY!!



Efficient packing - all that out of 2 Midgets!

The Courier Cafe, Urbana, IL

A few of the 'Vettes at the museum

Gassing up at an old service station

The CERV 1

We had breakfast at the state park lodge, thinking it would be quick.  Guess they had to wait for the chickens to lay some eggs, as we waited a long time for simple breakfasts, so got away a little later than we had planned.  We headed up Hwy. 1 and then picked up Hwy. 45.  The drive today was pretty boring.  The cars ran fine all day and we didn't stop in any cornfields!! There is mostly flat, green agricultural land that stretches seemingly to the horizon.  That is, unless there is corn growing along the roadway, then its like driving through a corn tunnel and you can't see anything over the corn!  Corn and beans, that about all there is.  The road is an old, concrete highway and is not in the best condition.  We stopped in Flora for gas and a break.  We decided to stop down the road in Effingham for lunch.  About 30 minutes later, we were in Effingham, which is the biggest city we've been in today, population about 12,000.  We drove downtown, but being Saturday, nothing was open except a pub, but it didn't serve food!  Turns out you need a special permit to serve food in a bar.  So, we found a locally owned, locally operated restaurant called Niemerg's Steakhouse.  It was very good, had good service, and the prices were shockingly (to those of us used to Atlanta prices) inexpensive.  They even gave us a tub of iced water to soak our neck ties in.  After lunch, we passed an O'Reillys and thought about stopping to get another spare fuel pump.  We have one spare fuel pump between us, do we really need another?  I decided to live on the edge and resisted the urge to stop.   We drove about 5 miles north of town to Mid-America Motorworks.  This is an aftermarket distributor of Corvette and VW performance parts and accessories.  They also have a small museum of about 20 or so Corvettes and a few VW Bugs, including one of the movie Herbies.  In front is a recreation of an old service station.  They even have a hose you run over that rings a bell to alert the attendant.  To those too young to remember, service stations used to have people come out and pump your gas, check your oil and clean your windshield.  And the gas was less than a dollar a gallon!  From there, we went on the Champaign-Urbana where we will stop for the night and rehydrate and cool off.  After checking in the hotel, we went to the Courier Cafe in downtown Urbana.  It's in an old, historic building that used to house a newspaper, the Urbana Courier from 1877 until it closed in 1979.  The building was renovated and the cafe opened in 1980.  We'll be heading up Hwy. 47 tomorrow to Elkhorn, WI.