Lebanon, Pennsylvania

I am here at Valspar, a company that makes varnish and the like, with a load of plastic cans/buckets from Central Can Company in Chicago, a shipper that was indeed my first load when I started driving a truck for Schneider way back in October of 2004. That load was full of buckets that were labeled for holding Calcium Carbide a “dangerous when wet” substance. Apparently it gets all exothermic and places that melt down scrap metal throw the buckets whole into the glowing vats to increase the temperature and speed up the process, at least that’s what some dude a the carbide place in Kentucky where I delivered said cans told me.
Toady I rumbled along the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes for the umpteenth time having come across the Indiana one the day before. I read somewhere that there was an early plan to connect New York and Chicago with toll roads. Now the intent probably wasn’t to charge people a lot of money as much as it was to connect the two cities with multilane limited access highways and the early versions of these were, in fact, all toll roads. (The completion dates of the roads in question: The New Jersey Turnpike, Pennsylvania Turnpike, Ohio Turnpike, Indiana Toll Road and Chicago Skyway are 1951, 1940, 1955, 1956, and 1958. (The Interstate system wasn’t even authorized until 1956 and not completed until 1991, although, technically, there are still some parts of the original plans that haven’t been built.)) The cost for a car to travel from New York City to Chicago (including the toll on the George Washington Bridge and the bridge crossing the Delaware River) would be $53.15. The same distance in a truck would cost $241.20. The bulk of both is the damn Pennsylvania turnpike which charges trucks $142.00 for 359 miles of tight, hilly, congested, poorly paved road, or six hours of delightful mountain scenery, depending on how you want to see it.
Prior to loading these cans I had Some Beer from Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis that I picked up after the Fruit2O delivery across the River in Granite City. I took that up to Arlington Heights on the northwest side of Chicago where I swapped it at the distributor where I was supposed to deliver it with a guy who was out of hours to deliver his load in nearby Morton Grove, a load of Potato Chips. With our powers combined what a party it could have been.
When I showed up at Anheuser-Busch they told me the load would not be ready until 10pm (13 hours from then) and so I settled in and got some work done and wondered what I could do. Although the day was cold and rainy Downtown St. Louis was only about a 2 mile walk up the street and though I have been through the city a number of times I have never seen what was there, nor indeed ever exited the vehicle in which I was traveling. I figured I needed to do what everyone should do in St. Louis. See the arch!
If you are searching for far and away the weirdest thing that the National Park Service has to offer, visiting the Arch would be it. Did you know you can travel to the top in a sort of elevator type thing?! Neither did I. So Weird! This elevator thing is completely bizzaro-world and really looks in all ways like something cast off from the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Check it out on Wikipedia.
Seriously though, all thoughts of imperialist manifest destiny and Indian genocide aside, the arch is a beautiful monument to the inexorable westward movement of European settlement in the north American continent and an engineering marvel.