Green, Green Grass

I really lucked out on my trip to the Midwest. The weather was "simply marvelous, darling"*. I had been expecting 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity and what I got was 75 to 80 degrees. At those temperatures the humidity doesn't matter too much. It was basically just like the summer weather we normally have in the Willamette Valley in Oregon.

Meanwhile at home they were having a heat wave. Temperatures got up to 105 for a while. Glad I wasn't here.

There were a couple of things I noticed while driving through the Midwest. There were the things you kind of expect, like lots of fields and farms, and the land is basically flat from here to forever. But then there were things that stuck out as being really different, and one of these was the huge lawns of green grass.

Oregon has these land use laws, which basically means they are trying to contain urban sprawl, which means that houses in the city have tiny lots and tiny lawns. Outside of town it is fields. Grass is grown as a crop. You just don't see endless vistas of mown grass.

Another thing you see is elaborate masonry buildings in downtown areas, both commercial and government structures. And churches, big churches with huge spires. Even small towns will have 3 or 4 of these huge edifices.

Outside of the cities, traffic on the freeways is almost sparse. You drive for hours, okay a quarter of an hour, without running into a situation where you need to slow down. Highways fell into four categories:

1. Good, smooth roads.
2. Older concrete roads in good condition, but with the bump, bump, bump of expansion joints.
3. Roads in bad shape.
4. Roads under construction.

Good, smooth roads were slightly more prevalent than the others. The remainder were about equally divided between the other three types.

* I'm sure this is a quote from some movie, but I only found one reference that claimed it was from "Breakfast at Tiffany's", so I don't know.