Are You Folks Okay?

Shit! Bollocks! Bugger! The car won’t start. This is a high-end hire car, we upgraded to ‘absolutely sodding everything’ package. It cannot not start. Oh, hold on, what’s this? Ah, rain; violent black Midwest rain, the rain that makes them able to grow anything here, and it’s not going to stop for me. Oh, hold on what’s this? A water bottle in my bag has broken, soaking my paperwork.

Phone call to National Car Hire fails multiple times from my UK phone. We have 425 miles to destroy today – a fair old drive and car trouble is not an option. Right… wait for Galena City Hall to open and plead in full Hugh Grant mode to use the phone. It is properly raining now – the type of rain that hurts your head. The car cannot be broken, we have The Schedule that took a year to plan.

Galena City Hall opens. I ask in Hugh Grant style for use of their lovely phone and they of course melt, the lady even dials the number for me. National talk me through the ‘security feature’:

a) Put seat belt on

b) Press fully on brake

c) Jiggle the key

d) Pat your head and recite the alphabet backwards

It starts. Our sense of relief is beyond words. Ashly had been ominously silent during the whole incident.

On Illinois 84 near Savannah we stop for breakfast at Poopey’s, a biker bar. It is wonderful. Two utter food snobs from South East England greedily destroy corn beef hash and piles of Elvis Bacon, even the odd coffee they serve here is deeply pleasing. The bikers are way more pleasant than most people in Hove. We are now settled in for a huge drive through northern Illinois and we sail through the 200 and a bit miles to the inevitable Mark Twain pit stop in Hannibal MO. This is why we’re here, to drive for hours through place names and calm beauty. Galesburg, Good Hope, Carthage, Keokuk, Lima, Ursa and all points at 55mph. I got over excited seeing signs for Rock Island – obviously. The radio is strictly both kinds of music – Country and Western. I’ve been a guitarist for longer than is decent but found myself in awe of “Bandy The Rodeo Clown” and “The Girls All Get Prettier At Closing Time”. It just sounds right. Near Grassy Creek we stop to look at yet another abandoned house, an old man pulls up in a car. ‘Are you folks okay?’, we smile and wave. He salutes and drives off. Salutes. We won’t forget that.

Hannibal MO is Mark Twain’s town. Think Stratford-upon-Avon, think Padstow, think Windsor. They actually have a Mississippi steamboat, you can ‘paint’ Huckleberry Finn’s fence with a ‘brush and pot’ safely secured at the end of a chain similar to one people from South East London have a dangerous dog at the end of. We duly do the photos and it’s idyllic. I buy Mark Twain tea towels, fridge magnets and a small MT doll for a kid we love who studies American literature – yeah, he’ll groove to that stoned off his tits in San Francisco.

The final leg is through Calhoun County IL and it’s a stare-out-the window and then stop every few miles – just to look. We go on County Highway 1 from Hardin to Grafton, that’s all you need to do, see the abandoned properties and the river road that has probably not changed in 50 years, and not many places can claim that – except maybe Wales and Romania.

This is the first two night stop and these are important (see HINTS).

To say Grafton Illinois is small-town American mid-west is a little like saying Barnsley is in Yorkshire. There’s a shop on the Main Street where they sell old stones. The hotel – which could easily double for a civil war HQ building has a “business centre” which consists of an out of order laptop, a pad and pencil, and an out of tune piano underneath the stairs.

The owner is a strange Anglophile who cannot talk to women – he wants to talk to me about Piccadilly Circus. His wife tells us to ignore him. Ashly does anyway. We are the only people in the hotel.

Sitting overlooking the now mighty river, we are hypnotised for hours watching for American Eagles swooping over the bluffs. I get a work email and hit ‘pretend it never arrived’. 

This is our first stop without having to be out on the road by 8am next morning since we’ve got here, and staring at the river seems the right thing to do. Grafton has riverside sculpture and hippy shops, and the people (when you can find them) are charming and happy. I wonder if we’ve wandered into a parallel universe, the Mississippi River is a world alone and if you ain’t been here you don’t know.

We eat at The Loading Dock overlooking the river. It’s our usual. Diet Coke, water, tacos and guacamole. I’ve lost 8lbs. I’m Sting mid-shag.