4/17/08 Midwest Tour Day 1

Day 1 –

9am – Delicious poached eggs provided by chef Elizabeth Loomis, who prefers to be called Lizzie Loomis

9:30am – Realize it’s time to leave, but the hollandaise sauce hasn’t coagulated yet – Jared runs out for butter, Dan slices cantaloupe

10:30am – Finally get on the road, bound for St. Louis

7:30pm – (30 minutes into Dan’s first stint driving), Jared notices an all-to-familiar foul smell and looks up to see steam pouring our of both sides of the hood

10:15pm – Jared and Dan finally stumble upon a bit of luck (in an evening that hadn’t been going so well lately) in the person of Richard the tow-truck driver. ‘Yup, Zanesville Ohio, don’t blink you’ll miss it.’ Their spirits are raised substantially when Richard (whose uniform had the name ‘Roger’ stenciled on it) when Richard delivers the quote of the evening:

Dan: So, how much are beers around here?

Richard: Well, I guess they’d be about a dollar and quarter.

(raucous, jubilant laughter from Jared and Dan)

Richard: Well, I haven’t been to a bar in a while, I guess they could be a dollar fifty now.

* * * * *

From there our luck got better then worse then better again. Better, because we seemed to have broken down in one of the most friendly and charmingly rural towns in America. Richard drove us (in his tow truck) to the best bar in town and even made a stop for Jared to buy contact solution at Rite Aid (which used to the Army Navy Store until they moved to smaller storefront down on 6^th street, just down the street from Christ’s Table). We drove to ‘The Barn’ by way of the famous Y-bridge (every town has to have a claim to fame, apparently the Y-bridge is Zanesville’s). The Y-bridge is the only bridge in the US to fork mid-river(!!!) which means that has to point of entry on one side of the river and two on the other. We weren’t able to discern why such a bridge was built, but it certainly looked cool trying over it.

The Barn didn’t have $1.50 beers but they did serve us over-size pints of Killians for $3. So we still basically felt like we were getting a free beer every round. The Barn was also packed full of bar games. Our time there reached its peak hilarity when we met Samantha, who thought we were scam artists when we told her we didn’t know how to play ‘cornhole’. Cornhole (we came to discover) is an outdoor game in which sacks are tossed at wooden platforms with a hole cut in them; 1 point for on the platform, 3 points for in the hole – hangers don’t count, gotta go down the hole. Apparently it is so ubiquitous in southern Ohio that the idea that one would be in Zanesville without knowing how to play it raises serious suspicion in even the friendliest young women.

Our morning in Zanesville couldn’t have been more charmingly Midwestern Actually, our luck initially turned south (again!!) when what we were told would be a cheap fix turned out to be a broken radiator and two hours of labor. But aside from that unfortunate the picturesque Ohioan morning was filled with -- first the garage that was fully staffed and caffeinated 15 minutes before their 8am opening time (ordering parts by 8:10 – nice work); then the semi-toothed waiter at Dixie’s Diner who asked if we wanted our eggs ‘dippy’ (which seems to mean ‘over-medium’); and the man who walked up to us while we were getting cash out of the ATM – he asked for help using it and actually wanted help using it – he wasn’t scamming us (it took a minute to suppress the new-york impulse to run)!

11am – back on the road!