Heading out today, we decided to make our way across the rest of Missouri and all the way through Illinois. A half hour in we began seeing signs for “Nostalgiaville”, which is a 50s & 60s memorabilia shop, and “Ozarkland”, a shop full of all kinds of goodies. Both looked interesting so we exited and stopped at Ozarkland first. The store was huge and full of every kind of souvenir you can imagine and plenty of local flavor. We spent around an hour walking around the place and picked up several things along the way. At the register, Jasmine heard a customer mention that Nostalgiaville had closed so we just jumped back onto the highway.
We ran into a lot of rain as we cruised along I70 through Missouri and into Illinois. We also had to stop a few times because Lady T was not happy with the heat and the several small hills we encountered. As we puttered on, we saw a sign for Casey, IL which claimed to be home to the largest wind chime, golf tee and rocking chair in the world. Since we hadn’t seen any roadside oddities in a while, we decided to have a look.
We followed sigs to the downtown area but we didn’t see the chime. We did find the golf course but it didn’t look easy to get into so we turned around. Oh, and the rocking chair didn’t exist save for two supports and a sign that read “Coming soon!” By this time, we were thinking Casey had created a nice scam to get you off the highway and into their downtown area.
Stopping at a local grocery store, I looked up the wind chime on my phone and located an address. We plugged that into the GPS and felt pretty stupid when we realized that we had passed the thing twice :/ Jasmine and I were both focused on the supports for the rocking chair on the opposite side of the road that we didn’t notice the gigantic wind chime directly across the street. We pulled over to take a few pictures and ring the chime. The café adjacent to the display had just closed but Jazz convinced the lady to open the door to sell her a couple of postcards ;o)
The rest of the day we just drove towards our home for the night, a Flying J Travel Center in Indianapolis, IN. We are thinking of making a detour from Indianapolis up to Lake Erie to explore for a day before the final leg of our return trip back to reality. DO we have time to go to PA to hang out on the lake or should we just continue our path home?
I guess you will have to continue to subscribe to find out 😉
~J&J
party bar and grill, a tattoo parlor, gun shop and a Gentleman’s club. Although it looked all closed up at 9:30 in the morning, I am sure it’s pretty full at night, despite the huge billboard directly across the street that warns travelers about the evils or pornography.
