Once we’d gotten to Paducah, it seemed faster than a speeding bullet that we were at the bridge spanning the Ohio River and crossing into Illinois.
The first town that we meet once on the Illinois side of the river is Metropolis and they certainly lean into the legend of their much larger namesake and it’s most famous resident and protector in a big way!
I have a mate currently working at the Gilbert Theatre in Fayetteville who is a *HUGE* fan of Superman who made a point of visiting Metropolis IL when the national tour of “Paw Patrol: Live!” was doing a show in a city that was relatively nearby (and if memory serves, it was still quite a ride as this part of Illinois is really in the middle of nowhere!).
Even the rest area couldn’t resist having an opportunity for one to poke their head above Superman’s shoulders for a picture and of course I was so doing that (thanks Mom for snapping the photo on the phone!).
Speaking of faster than a speeding bullet, this was the first test of the “Emergency East Coast People Identification System”.
How can you readily identify people who live on the east coast of this country?
Simple. A time zone change always catches them off-guard! About halfway to the Ohio River near Paducah, we also crossed into Central time and faster than even Superman we were now one hour in the past compared to where we were at the hotel that morning.
If you live in the east for any appreciable time, time zone differences are almost irrelevant because you rarely if ever have to think of them. Haven’t you ever noticed that whenever the announcer on the telly or the advert for an upcoming programme says what time it’s going to be shown live, it’s always a variation on “X o’clock Eastern, X-3 o’clock Pacific”. We don’t have to really think much past that information to know when the show is on.
The only time you get times reported to you in Central or Mountain time is if you’re actually there and watching a station in that time zone.
It shouldn’t come as a huge shock as most of the entertainment and news programming is created and/or originates either from New York, Washington, or Atlanta in the east and Los Angeles or San Francisco in the west.
Now, I’m probably more intimately aware of time zone differences than ten people put together. One of my jobs in the distant past was to have our application represent any time zone the user wished as the software was envisioned to work in health care organisations that might have branches round the world. In order to keep from driving myself utterly mad, I managed to get the architect to agree that any timestamp stored in the database would be stored as Universal Time Coordinated or Greenwich Mean Time for us older people. UTC/GMT never changes and is the time by which all other times and time zones are derived. Whilst it was tougher on me to convert timestamps into UTC and back out again, it made reporting data from the database much easier as I never had to guess what time zone the time represented. All I needed to know is what time zone the user wanted me to display the timestamp to them and the query was smart enough to do that automatically.
But it still caught me by surprise that we’d subtly come into the Central time zone but the phone and the onboard clock on the hire car weren’t fooled. It took them a few minutes to update automatically but update they did.
That would actually have some effect upon what we were planning on doing now that we effectively had another hour to play with and our meet-up was still a few hours away.
I had some legal business to sort out in Harrisburg at the Saline County tax assessor’s office with my father’s mineral rights that he’d inherited so we headed straight there from Metropolis and after a couple of laps in downtown Harrisburg, I was able to find the building.
The county recorder was kind enough to let me use the public use terminals to see if he’d ever filed the deed on those parcels he was planning to (he didn’t) and then I was heading upstairs to the assessor’s office with paperwork in hand to see if they could transfer the mineral rights into my name. Well, all of the required paperwork save one critical one…a copy of Dad’s will! So out I go to the hire car to retrieve that and back upstairs and it should be sorted out once they get past the madness of a revaluation year and everyone complaining about it.
It didn’t take as long as I’d imagined it would and we still had some time to play with so I figured I’d see if I could locate Aunt Oma Lee and Uncle David’s farm. This would be a case of believing I’d found it a couple of years prior but not being so confident as I seemed to remember the house being a different colour.
This time, I had no doubts I’d found it and then round the way I found Cindy’s farm on an adjacent parcel (this time I could see the name on the mailbox).
At this point, I was going to just wander round and see what else of Grandma and Grandpa’s old stomping grounds I could find when I noticed that one of the garage doors was up on Cindy’s house. We weren’t supposed to meet up for another couple of hours and we were going to meet in Marion but we figured we’d take a chance and ring the doorbell.
We had caught her husband Ted who had just returned home and was waiting for Cindy to arrive so they could meet us at his office in Marion about half a hour west of their house!
Ooops. I guess I kind of blew that plan to smithereens! 🙂
Cindy shows up a few minutes later and we have a chance to relax and chat a bit before they graciously take us on a tour of some of the sights in Galatia. This little trip down memory lane reminded me so much of the time Aunt Oma Lee and Uncle David took Dad and I on a tour of the area when we had come round for Grandma’s funeral in 1998.
The big difference was that I had a camera at hand to get some pictures of places of interest such as the church that Cindy attended whilst growing up and Tate’s Chapel which figured quite prominently in Grandpa’s side of the family including the final resting place of his father.
But the highlight of the tour had to be finally seeing the one room schoolhouse where Grandma taught on Possum Flat Road after two previous failed attempts. I had always thought it was in nearby Raleigh IL but it turns out that it was actually in Galatia (where Dad was actually born). The building has undergone some additions and remodeling since but you can see the schoolhouse styling of the time especially looking at that wide porch where the front doorway was clearly moved from where it was originally installed.
We even got to meet the new owner of the property when Ted did that amazing rural Illinois trick of pulling into the driveway and asking her some questions. She had a lot of work ahead of her as someone had stripped the place of all the copper but she seemed pleasantly surprised to learn about the history of her new home.
It was at this point that I was rather thankful I’d kind of screwed up the original plan because I would have never found any of these places on my own much less known their relevance. Most of the “roads” were actually one-lane gravel tracks and I was relieved to see that even Ted was relying on the satnav…I wouldn’t have had a chance at finding any of them!
As you can tell from the pictures of Tate’s Chapel at nautical twilight, our original idea of having dinner in Marion near where we were staying was also out the window so we ended up at the Village Pizza and Grill in downtown Galatia and it certainly didn’t disappoint! I ended up choosing a flatbread pizza called the “Bearcat Special” which had pretty much all of the toppings you could imagine and let’s just say “Go Bearcats!” If you know, you know…
If you want to get a feel for what southern Illinois is really like, this eatery certainly does the trick. Everyone is just so friendly and welcoming and we even had one of Ted’s grilling buddies come round to chat us up a bit. Speaking of grilling, the steak that Ted was enjoying was locally sourced and you can certainly tell as it was quite a bit tastier than even some of the fanciest of steakhouses I’ve visited.
Sadly, it was time to bid Cindy and Ted adieu and make the half hour trek to Marion for our lodging as we’d be making a relatively early start for Hutsonville in the morning.
Mind you, it wasn’t until later that I’d realised that in all of the photos I’d taken…none of them had Ted and Cindy in them so pardon me for bogarting a recent picture of them from a recent wedding they attended so you can at least see who was kind enough to schlep Mom and I round greater metropolitan Galatia! 🙂
