Roadtrip!

I was going on an old-fashioned road trip this weekend. I was going to a place I’ve been over a half dozen times in the past 14 years, but only once in the last five. A little town in Illinois that never seemed to change. The same stores, the same restaurants with the same menus of hometown favorites, the same little flower garden in front of that well-kept home on that street whose name we could never remember but the town was small enough we could always find anyway. The kind of town that proudly advertised their French restaurant was in the bowling alley. Kind of a Mayberry type of place.

I was going to a doll show there, but the show has been cancelled because nobody comes anymore. For the past 15 years, the show has been the opening event at a roadside tourist attraction called Rockome Gardens. I just read the place is up for sale and the doll show cancelled. Rockome Gardens is going the way of so many of the old attractions that used to lure the traveler to spend a few hours and a few bucks. Nobody stops anymore.

Nobody stops to see the real Amish farmhouse beside a house made of Fresca bottles. No one wants to ante up the extra buck fifty to go through the haunted cave and see the “baby rattlers” or a quarter to see the amazing trained chicken play a piano. You couldn’t drag the kids into the Quilt Store to see the old ladies actually having a quilting bee, but they didn’t mind stopping by the bake shop to get some freshly made, still warm cinnamon rolls or plunking their butts down in the world’s largest rocking chair, if they had to be there anyway. Nobody wants to drive 25 miles off the highway anymore to sit in a chair, no matter how silly.

The town’s probably changed along with the rest of the world in the past five years. Family owned restaurants replaced by the usual fast-food hamburger joints that are the same no matter where you go. The downtown variety store turned into a dollar store. The people with the lovely garden retired, moved to Florida, and sold their house to a bunch of kids so there’s only a pile of rocks in the front yard.

So I’m not going to go. I don’t want to know if the town has changed. I already know the secret of the “baby rattlers” and if you’ve seen one Fresca bottle-house, you’ve seen them all. But I'm glad I saw it once.