Stage 1: Chicago - St. Louis (280 miles)

Two evenings ago at the JapanaiseChicago sushi restaurant we got the feeling that was probably the last good quality meal in a sophisticated ambience and amongst a surprisingly good looking crowd (yes, there are hot women in the US too!) that we were going to see for a while.

However, you are never quite ready when reality slaps you in the face. And what a slap that was... 30 miles down I-55 (Interstate 55) we got hungry and decided to make a quick pit stop in godforsaken Godley. We picked a family owned "eating pit" to serve as the first on the road meal. It was nothing short of an absolute disaster. I knew we were in trouble when I felt the smell of deep fried everything 2 meters before actually entering the place. It's all in tones of green, pale sad and greasy green, and at 4pm it is not crowded but there are three tables of obese old folks having... dinner? There are no smiles, no energy not even conversations just a few casual exchanges like "pass me the salt".

The meatloaf special with mashed potatoes hardly qualified as food and Miller light hardly qualifies as beer (check out the "lunch of champs" pic. Someone can still make a happy face...). We got out of there as quickly as possible, bought some seed free genetically modified grapes to help minimize the ulcera risk and got back into our huge Jeep Liberty to proceed 4 long hours into endless corn fields at 65 mph (the only really interesting moment of the journey was when we saw an acrobatic plane spraying the corn fields).

The good news is that at St. Louis we were back to civilization. Nice place, I'll talk about that some other time.