Our first day took us from Champaign to Iowa City where we spent the night with our friends Kristin and Wayne. You wouldn’t know it by the picture, but Kristin is the director of the School of Music at the University of Iowa and Wayne is the director of orchestras at Iowa City’s West High School.
We packed 30 days of essentials into the trunk of the spider. I was so proud of Jean—she only brought four pairs of shoes. I learned my packing skills from my good friend, Dave Kayser. Dave and I met as graduate students at Yale where we both founded the Brass Ring. Dave spent four years playing the trombone in the U.S. Army Band at West Point and was in charge of packing the band buses for tours. One time in 1987 while we were on tour in South Florida with the Brass Ring, Dave packed the entire quintet, luggage and instruments, into a small Plymouth Valiant station wagon to the amazement of a crowd gathered to watch this feat in the Hertz rental car lot at the Ft. Lauderdale airport. They applauded as we drove away to play our first concert on Marathon Key. We played together for 15 years, and he taught me everything I know about packing a car…and a cooler.
The Twin Grove Wind Farm is along Route 9 in central Illinois. It is the largest wind farm east of the Mississippi and stretches for almost 12 miles. It generates enough electricity to power over 100,000 homes for a year.
This sundial in Pekin, IL, is billed as the greatest sundial in the world. In order for a sundial to be totally accurate, it must be on a multiple of 15° longitude, and in the central time zone that multiple would be 90°. The sundial in Pekin is at 89.63° and is accurate to within 1 minute and 3 seconds per day.
This is the extent of our excitement for the day…we’re hurt’n.