Indiana or Bust: Day 4 (finale)

Today I covered about 400 miles, going from Iowa to the St. Louis Gateway Arch, then on to my final destination of Terre Haute. Over the past four days I've driven through 9 states total that covered about 2300 miles.

If Iowa is the heartland of America, when I had to pick a city in the state to represent my first memories of it, I picked Iowa City because what could possibly be more Iowa-like than Iowa City, Iowa?

After leaving the aorta of the heartland, I headed south to St. Louis to finally see the arch for my first time. It was an easy trip through fairly boring country, but St. Louis was a pretty exciting place. I checked out the Arch and the Museum below it, and headed back onto the road since it was about 26ºF outside and pretty cold with just a down coat.

Gateway Arch

The arch is beautiful and breathtaking and the building below it is a really great space to be in. It's such a modern and futurist place and it really captures the height of that early 1960s era obsessions with space and technology. I spent some time wandering the museum and would have gone up in the arch elevator but it was an hour-long tour that was starting in another hour, so I figure next time I'm there, I'll do it.

Unfortunately that means I also missed out on the City Museum, which half a dozen people told me was a not-miss place. Another destination for the next time I'm in StL.

The miles were finally getting old on the way to Indiana with traffic and semi trucks on small highways constantly passing you (or you passing them).

CBS, call me

While driving through Illinois I saw this and another Great Idea™ came to mind.

CBS has tons of cop shows and doctor shows and FBI shows and their audience demographics skew quite old and if CBS wants to keep profits high, they're going to need to transition over to the next generation as CBS' main audience and that's of course, Generation X.

What better way to do that than by launching a hot new show this fall called Station 85: St. Elmo's Fire Department.

It'll be a gritty thriller/drama/trauma show where the audience follows the day to day operations of a fire department in the town of St. Elmo, Illinois.

This fire-fighting, life-saving crew will consist of literal first responders—by which I mean anyone from the original brat pack that was first to respond to an email asking if they weren't busy and could work on a new show.

You're leaving bags of money on the table, CBS/Paramount+, every day that passes and SEFD isn't on TV.

One state per tank

The 2003 Jetta I'm driving got around 38-40mpg over the course of the trip and I frequently went about 450 miles between fuel stops. I started in Oregon and wondered if I could get all the way across the country without having to fuel up twice in any state. It got a little hairy in Wyoming and Nebraska since they were both hundreds of miles long but in the end the trip used 6 gas stops in 6 different states, only skipping fuel completely in Utah, Illinois, and Indiana.

Hot tip: If you ever consider a diesel car or truck, get one that also comes in a gas version. The vehicles are designed around the need for a larger gas tank, since the gas model will get worse fuel economy than the diesel version, so that means you get a crazy long range in most diesels with larger tanks.

The Jetta TDI has a 14.5 gallon tank and if you can keep the engine in the 40-50mpg range you can go 500, 600, or even a rare 700 miles per tank. I had a BMW X5 diesel once that had a 26 gallon tank because the gas X5 only got 16mpg. My diesel version did about 25mpg so that meant I could always drive over 500 miles between gas stops consistently.

Finally, Indiana

I finally made it to my destination tonight, after my third time change of the trip as the clock ticked forward a whole hour right on the freeway off-ramp, making me think I was suddenly an hour late for when I said I'd show up. It’s wild that Google Maps on desktop always warns you about any upcoming time changes but the iOS app when you're driving somewhere in your car just completely doesn’t. It's like Google is saying "Oh well, you're an hour off and we never told you. Suck it up, buttercup."

To be honest, I‘m pretty fried after such a whirlwind trip in such a tight timeframe, but I’ll write some additional thoughts and takeaways at some point here next week, after I’ve flown home and had time to reflect.

(Want to go back to the start? Here's Day 0 where it all started)