Full-Color Vending Machines

 

This morning Travalon and I set out after dropping a few of my more delicate plants with Kathbert and picking up the gift for the bride from Cecil Markovitch. Just a few miles down the road I realized I had forgotten a summer hat, but we figured we could buy one on the road, because what could I need more than another summer hat? Much further down the road I remembered that I had not drunk the last serving of soy milk, so when we stopped in a tiny town called Paw Paw for gas, we also checked their grocery store for soy milk. The reason this is blogworthy is because the woman working there said, "We used to have it and nobody bought it, but you're the third person who came in asking for it today!"

We stopped for lunch in La Salle, at the Uptown Grill where we ate last summer, and the parmesan-encrusted whitefish was just as good as we'd remembered. The weather was beautiful there, so we took a walk to a grocery store that had large containers of soy milk, but not the personal-sized ones I thought you used to be able to get. We did get a bottle of Life Water with a cool design. 

Near Arcola, Illinois, we saw a spectacular sunset.

We stopped at the Green Creek Rest Stop, which advertised "Vending Machines," and that struck us as funny because all rest stops seem to have vending machines. I said it was like the bar in Montreal, Wisconsin that advertised "Air Conditioned ATM," and Travalon said it made him think of the hotel in Portage that advertises "Color TV," so I said maybe the title of this blog post should be "Full-Color Vending Machines." The rest stop itself seemed enchanted. The woods behind it looked so spooky.

And the advertised vending machines sold stuffed animals! I've never seen that before. They were not expensive, so we got this tiny bear.

They also had this vending machine that seemed to insult the buyer.

In Mount Vernon we stopped for dinner at Culver's, to use the gift card I won at the Shamrock Club party. To our surprise, they sold Curdis for $8, and also his wife? (I thought you could only get Curdis for special things, like a consolation prize for not getting a Curder Burger. I had never seen him for sale before.) So we had to buy our Curdis back home a wife.

They also had a giant Curdis and Mrs. Curdis, but when we asked the girl behind the counter how you would buy one of those, she said she's been trying to find out herself for ages. This saved us from getting a giant Curdis. We saw a giant triceratops just like our medium-sized one Tonica at a gas station near Tonica the town, but we didn't get that either. We did get a tie-dyed llama when we got some soy milk at a Kroger's not too far from the Culver's, but sorry, I forgot to take a photo. Look for that tomorrow.

Famous Hat