Missura to cornfields

Since I last wrote!: Have moved on from Kansas to make tracks across Missouri and Illinois.

I made muffins for my friend JC in St. Louis while waiting for him to get home from Spanish class the night I was there. After he took a bite, I asked how they were and he said they tasted "healthy." That didn't sound like a positive thing, but he proceeded to eat six of them in two hours, so they must not have been that bad. (I think they got better when I made them again a few days later in Illinois and added some of the chocolate from the 11-pound block of 70% cocoa that the kitchen staff at work gave me as a goodbye present. The gift that keeps on giving.)

Then, after staying on the couch in my pj's for about five hours after I woke up on Wednesday morning (it is truly frightening how easy it is to adjust to being unemployed), the opportunity to reconnect with my friend E urged me back in the car and on to Champaign, IL. Her office at the university had us both ogling places we'd like to go and pointing at places we've each lived....

...and then while she (oh productive soul, working full time, helping to raise two kids, and writing her PhD thesis) actually did some work, I went off to observe a college town in action. It was one of those fantastic spring days that only people who live in places that get a multi-month, gray, deep winter freeze can fully enjoy. Having gone to a women's college, I've never really had the opportunity to observe a frat house of the likes that I passed by on my walk through campus, with dozens of guys playing volleyball and tossing footballs while others lounged on the porch with beer and rap music blasting. It was novel and fascinating. The lawn of the campus quad was more my speed. I pretended to be one of the crowd and spent a couple of hours lying in the grass. I might even have taken a nap. I don't think I was the only one.

E later drove me by a business whose name is mine, though turned around (upside-down):

And we partook in the fun offered by the local roller skating rink.

Could there be two more disparate types of footwear?

E, being a recent transplant to the Midwest, was amazed at the cultural experience of the skating rink. That was the story of every birthday party I attended in my adolescence as a Wisconsinite, though. Me, I was trying to get used to learning about the existence of bubble tea (not pictured), which I tasted for the first time at Cocomero in Champaign. Am I honestly the only person who has NEVER known about bubble tea before now? What rock have I been living under?

Though I am confident there are many more marvels to discover in Champaign, IL (and I will be back!), it was--too soon--time to move on. So farther north I drove, through fallow cornfields and windmill fields...

...and eventually over the border into my home state...