Our road trip to DC

Mary and I spent the past week driving to the east coast and back. We visited our daughter and her husband in northwest Indiana and our son and his wife in Washington, DC. Like so many of Iowa’s best and brightest, our kids had to flee the state to realize their potential.

We took the car to see the country and deliver a Times newspaper vending machine to our son, who wanted one for a souvenir. We have several in our old press room gathering dust. Do you know how much noise an old metal newsrack makes bouncing around in the back of a car on a cross country trip?

A few random thoughts came to mind while sitting behind the wheel for 2,400 butt-numbing miles:

Gas is still too cheap when you drive the speed limit and every other vehicle blows past like you’re standing still. Interstate 65 between Chicago and Indianapolis is a particularly thrilling experience, especially when you’re being tailgated at 75 mph.

You may have heard about Buc-ee’s, the mega gas stations down south. We came across a new competitor, Wally’s, just north of Indianapolis. There are 84 fuel pumps plus high speed chargers for electric vehicles, surrounding a convenience store bigger than a supermarket. Its spacious restrooms are the nicest I’ve seen, and feature higher quality toilet paper than most homes have. This Wally’s just opened at the end of June. There are two other locations: Pontiac, Ill., and Fenton, Mo. They have a ways to go to catch up with Buc-ee’s 58 sites.

Speaking of restrooms — and our politicians seem to talk a lot about them lately — Ohio’s interstate rest stops are the nicest I’ve seen. They make Iowa’s look like outhouses.

Ohio’s roads are better than Iowa’s too. And they are well-patrolled by state troopers, so watch out.

There were a lot of road construction projects along our journey, but hardly anyone was working on them, despite perfect weather. Where do all the road crews go once they start a project? If they’d stay on the job, they could finish in a fraction of the time it seems to take.

We stopped in Somerset, Penn., for fuel, nine miles from the Flight 93 National Memorial from 9/11/2001. We have visited that hallowed site where heroic passengers wrestled an airplane away from hijackers and crashed it in a farm field rather than let it be used as a weapon against our nation’s capital. It’s an awe-inspiring visit if you’re ever out that way.

Today, DC’s National Mall is a mess, full of half-finished construction, large expanses of dead grass, surveillance cameras watching every step you take and seemingly more cops and federal agents than tourists. Chain link fences keep visitors 50 yards away from the still unfinished reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. We used to feel welcome in Washington. Now we feel like interlopers with all the eyes watching us.

Sunday we were able to witness some of the 33,000 competitors in the Washington Marathon as they ran by the Capitol en route to their rigorous 26-mile tour around DC.

We were only in Washington for two days before we had to head home to The City Beautiful. We didn’t have the heart to look at the mess that’s being made at the White House.