Monday's Activities

Hi everybody,

Time to continue on my progress report. On monday, my affiliate blogger and I went into St. Louis to have breakfast and meet with a prominent local blogger. You can consult my affiliate blog here for a full account of the meeting. Anyway, to sum it up, the man, whom we had not met before, was kind enough to give us a first-class tour of St. Louis. I had never been there before, so it was a real treat.

Pressing eastward, we decided to head north to visit Springfield briefly. Not the home of the Simpsons, but a prominent place worth visiting nonetheless. It is also significant because Springfield is the stomping grounds of past and future presidents. It was where Abraham Lincoln began his career in the Illinois legislature, and where Barack Obama did the same more than a century later.

There are several monuments dedicated to Lincoln there, they even preserved the building that was the Illinois state capital at the time Lincoln was there. In all the gift shops we could find, there was no shortage of Lincoln merchandise, and you would probably do okay in the department of Obama merchandise. In one of the shops, the cashier happened to have waited on Obama when he was still active in Springfield. She had some good things to say about him, but I don't remember exactly what they were.

Later in the afternoon, we continued east, and stopped briefly in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, home to the University of Illinois. I'll tell you, one benefit of driving across the uniformly level terrain of the Midwest is that the radio signals carry a long, long way. We were able to listen to radio stations from all these cities way out in the empty countryside, with nothing but farms around us.

Tiring of sitting in the car watching mile after mile of farmland pass, we decided to stop briefly in town. A chill wind blew on us, and we hung out in a small coffee shop as the night moved in. We then turned south, and along the way, listen to someone from the university lecture on the Vietnam War. He had been in the Navy at the time, and then started questioning, then objecting, to the mission at hand. He was now encouraging veterans of Iraq to do the same.

We moved further South through lonely vacant land made even more lonely by the night. After crossing the Ohio River, we entered Kentucky, and stopped at the first block of motels that presented itself. I tried blogging, but was unable to access my blog. Thus concluded Monday.

This is the Daily Reeder, Over&out.

Sunday's Activities

Hi Everyone,

Well, as you're no doubt aware, I've gotten behind on this blog. So, considering all the things I've done, I'm gonna have to update you in parts. So here's what I did sunday.

We got back on the road, I-70, and headed east through Missouri. By midday, my affiliate blogger and I arrived in Columbia, home of the University of Missouri (GO TIGERS!). My affiliate had someone in mind here he wanted to talk to. The person he wished to interview worked at a movie theater in the center of town.

They people there described to us what life was like in Columbia and Missouri in general. I don't get this very often, being a native of the Western Sun Belt (LA area). They described it as a "Southern State", which is an interesting perspective, given that Missouri borders Kentucky and Tennessee.

They said that the politics of the region vary. In Columbia and St. Louis, things looked pretty progressive, but they said that places like Jefferson City were very right-wing. In this past year, though, the state was pretty evenly split down the middle. A few days after the election, Missouri went for John Mc Cain, but just barely.

They even talked about Proposition 8 that stirred up lots of emotions back home. They told us that California sets kind of a norm for the rest of the country. It was nice to them say this, since I've grown wary of people dumping on my home state.

Pressing on, we arrived in St. Louis, and stayed in a motel on the outskirts for the night. Fortunately enough, the St. Louis area has a modern train system, and we took that into downtown. We saw where the famous Gateway Arch is, and strode across the Mississippi into Illinois. Then it was time to head back to the hotel for the night, because we had someone else we had to talk to in the morning. So until the next update,

This is the Daily Reeder, Over&out.