Saturday night in Carlyle, Illinois, and the joints are jumping.
Well, sort of.
There are four bars. One, in a basement, is for the sophisticates of this tiny town, 60 miles east of St Louis in Clinton County. There was a lot of big hair. It's just opposite a fabulous neon sign for the First National Bank which I can't show you because by the time I'd been back to our motel to get the camera it had been turned off for the night.
In a second, on the main street, the boys were playing pool and their girls were listening to MOR rock: Rod Stewart and the like. This is 2002, after all.
In another all was quiet while four people discussed Nascar racing.
In the last were a couple of guys with Harleys parked outside - one was a customised Softail with diamond cut cylinder heads and a nifty soft blue neon light that lit the chrome around the engine. It's owner, in turn, had a nifty mullet.
We had had a pleasant (near 200-mile) ride from the lovely city of Madison on the banks of the Ohio through the rolling farmland of southern Illinois. Nothing much happened, but then nothing much does happen round these parts.
Carlyle, Illinois to Columbia, Missouri
Today we had the perfect American Sunday afternoon. We went to a baseball game, ate hot dogs and drank cold beer, and watched the St Louis Cardinals whup the Kansas City Royals 5-1.
When we arrived in town there were thousands of people already queuing to get into the ballpark, two hours before the start. It was one of those days when they gave away a free gift to the first 30,000 to show up - a nine-inch model of one of the players with a bobbing head. We thought they said bobble hat, which did seem a bit odd given the weather.
The match had been a sell-out but we had struck lucky. The previous night, before hitting the bars of Carlyle, we had eaten wonderfully tender, marinated sirloin steaks at Patrick's. Our waitress's boyfriend had two spare tickets for the game, so we rode the 60 miles to the Mississippi for the lunchtime start. The stadium is right down town, just beside the Gateway Arch, a stunning 630ft stainless steel arch on the banks of the river where huge coal barges, being pushed along by tugs, used to ply up and down. The arch, in which there are lifts to the top, is officially a monument to the western pioneers and underneath it, underground, is the fascinating Museum of Westward Expansion.
It is quite humbling to think that every inch we pass over on this trip west was once the frontier.
