Searching For Monkey’s Eyebrow

I have a mad (let’s not beat around the bush here) ex-girlfriend who has been prescribed Lithium (google it) and there is a town in Missouri called Lithium! Let’s go there. It’s like a town called Heroin or Crackville. You can’t hurt us now, you’re in misery in the English rain.

Hang on, we’re in brutal Midwest rain. Drat. And we still need to get out of Ste Genevieve.

Breakfast in Ste Genevieve was a truly tough gig. I shall quote my wife:

“Potato pie glazed with sweet mini sausages and tinned peaches, pretend cream and gritty coffee topped with mini-moo half fat milk and a slab of greasy lard cake. The sausages were made of pig-sugar and the coffee was ground in their basement from old pubic hair.”

We try to leave Ste Genevieve but it’s not that easy. The maniac’s card machine doesn’t want to work. I really want it to work. ‘I’ll go to the (drive thru) cash point, like, err, now.’ Ashly looks at me like a very sad cow/sheep/goat and her message is clear. Do Not Leave Me Here Alone. Get me out of Ste Genevieve and get me out now.

She wants to see Kentucky and it’s another Midwest morning.

We drove through Lithium, it doesn’t matter, the rain is hard and we move on to … wait for it. Chester Illinois! Whaddya mean you don’t know Chester Illinois? It’s the home of Popeye. We stop in the rain at the Popeye museum (google it) and the lovely old folk in the museum obviously hear us speak and so it begins…

Ok, Ashly was a Greenham Common protestor, arrested, etc etc. Yeah, guess the rest. The old boy running the Popeye museum heard our voices and proclaimed; ‘I was over your way in the 80’s, hunkering down in Green-ham-co-mon, defending the air-base, know it?’

I gag Ashly. We buy a postcard and scuttle off into the dark Illinois rain. She was never there! Honestly. She hums some lesbian Greenham songs as the skies get angrier. I’m running out of rain adjectives…

Cairo IL is almost a ghost town, they once had businesses and there were houses. “Almost a Ghost Town” will be the Chamber of Commerces’ new tag-line. If you go there you realise it’ll work a treat, let’s call some marketing hipsters. Earlier I think we see a wild dog at Reynoldsville IL, large Coyote type-thing. Huge.

Look at a map. Any map. Pick a route from Ste Genevieve MO to Paducah KY. Every route you pick will be beautiful. They don’t call it Blue Grass for nothing, it’s real, the horses are by the side of the highway looking over fences, the grass is waist high and sweeping gently in the breeze. Pick any road; as Ashly says ‘it’s not short horses it’s long grass,’ we are as happy as it is possible to be. I stop every few miles to take pictures of grass. Ashly goes up to perfect fences and touches horse-noses. The beauty of the grass and the horses keeps stopping us – this is the point of short driving days (see TIPS).  I mistakenly only photograph cows.
I pull the car over and  Ashly gets out. I watch her with the Kentucky horses and feel very small. She stands next to them for what seems like ages, they make her calm and they make her happy. The horses seem happy for fucks sake…

So where is Monkeys Eyebrow? It’s near the Ohio river, we can’t find it. There is a crossroads by Oscar KY and that’s the closest you can get. It’s on the map, we spent hours trying to find Monkeys Eyebrow – stood at a crossroads and the locals stared and asked if we were lost: No, we’re just looking for Monkeys Eyebrow KY. We know it exists but it’s not on our 21st century satellite shit. We give up. I’m cheered up by passing a huge rig controlled by “Mary Lee the Lady Trucker”, I tell my wife I’d really like to meet her.

She laughs out loud.

Paducah KY must be described as extremely charming. That’s what it is. Calm, civilised and smiley. The apartment is also extremely charming – after the biblical hell of Ste Genevieve this is a died-and-gone-to-heaven accommodation – and it’s managed by a gentleman who is not scary or borderline misanthropic. This is a result. In the evening it’s Margaritas, Ceviche, and clean sheets. We’re also blessed by not having a manky old toilet slap-bang in the middle of the bedroom. This is also a result. Tomorrow morning I’ll clean the car up (see TIPS). There is also a “Quilt Museum”. How can you lose?