Here Is Where Time Is On Our Side

That Time I Spent A Lot Of Money On Gas Part 5: St. Louis to Louisville and the Trans-Dimensional Insects

Leaving St. Louis into Illinois, I went across the relatively new Stan Span. It was a fairly impressive structure and a picture of it would go very nicely here but 1) I didn’t notice any place to pull over for a picture while on the bridge and 2) that might have been because I made the mistake of looking up at the cable supports and was too busy getting the weird jibblies in my gut parts. Here’s something I found on the internets from the bridge’s designer HNTB::

Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge

I skipped heading north to Chicago because I’ve already done that and at this point in the trip, I was bee-lining for Louisville. Somewhere in the middle of Missouri I knew I’d be staying a couple of days between Louisville and Lexington to do the Bourbon Trail, so I found a hotel located between the two cities on my handy-dandy phone and made a reservation. (My phone wasn’t really handy-dandy for large portions of my trip–usually when having GPS would have been really, really helpful.)

I went vroom-vroom east on I-64 through Illinois and Indiana. It wasn’t that late at that point, but I only passed a dozen or so cars in both states, so I’m pretty sure I somehow ended up in an alternate dimension. The alternate dimension was very noisy. As I zoomed along in the dark, I could hear very distinct insectile chirping even over my blaring stereo and engine noise. I turned off my tunes and rolled down my window and confirmed, yes, that was indeed the sound of insects. Other-dimensional insects. Huge, man-eating, other-dimensional insects. Like in The Mist. I rolled my window back up, hugged my bug spray and hoped none of them would jump in front of my car since they were quite obviously the size of cattle.

[If you really must know, after Googling “loud-ass bugs’, “really noisy insects” and “the fuck is making all that noise”, I managed to narrow down that I likely heard Brood XXIII of the Magicicada neotredecim.]

About 5 hours later, I managed to cross into Kentucky unaccosted. If any cult kids from Nebraska managed to follow me to that point, I’m sure the other-dimensional insects ate them.

Start at the beginning.

Part 6