-----There were no clouds when we left West Des Moines, and post-mediocre waffles, we set out for downtown. The fastest route was through the city, and along the route lay the stadium of the Iowa Cubs, Chicago's Triple-A affiliate. With no game on the docket, we waltzed past the silent front desk people and straight into the team store, where there was no one there. My dad's timid "hellos" would have echoed eerily had the store been larger.

-----Most of what the Iowa Cubs sell is just regular Cubs merchandise with "Iowa" in script stuffed in somewhere nearby. It's a half-cooked aesthetic and prevents the team from having its own identity. Their pennant was in this vein—though cheaper than most are—and we were checked out by a college intern who looked half-asleep, which added to the dreariness of her already pancake-flat personality. I would usually diagnose an especially rowdy party on the prior night, but she seemed the type for whom a slightly different shade of mayonnaise would provoke a faint.

-----Pennant in tow, we were back on the road, and it wasn't too much longer that we got out of Des Moines. The downtown area was cute—in as far as downtown areas are concerned, as I view most cities as basically the same sort of thing anyway—but we had the rest of Iowa and most of Illinois to go. Our next stop was the college town of Iowa City, whose signage heavily implies that it used to be the state capital. Being a college town, there was no Jimmy John's shortage. I don't want to abandon forever the idea of going to local places, but sticking to an eating schedule has really helped us make tracks back across the country.

-----Not far from Iowa City is West Branch, best known for being the birthplace of Herbert Hoover. History tends to make his presidency out as ineffective at best and malicious at worst and his legacy is relegated to being amongst the five or ten worst to ever hold office. He was known as the Great Humanitarian for his civilian work in bringing large-scale food relief to Europeans during World War I, putting in long days to help them through the crisis. When the Great Depression hit on his watch, he turned back to the way his family would weather the periodic recession or depression, and assumed that wealth would be infused into the economy much as he had helped in Europe. By the time things got worse, he was too unpopular—and too much of a lame duck—to get anything done.

-----Hoover rehabilitated himself in the public eye until his death in 1964, mostly by temporal distance from the Depression era. He had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and possessed an optimistic ideology about the elimination of poverty. Yet his work in the public eye went well beyond the public perception of his ineptitude, even in the Depression, when he sought to bolster the financial infrastructure in subtle ways and at arm's length.

-----His birthplace, which is integrated into the cute and historic West Branch, is next to his Presidential Library and Museum. We hadn't the time to visit that part of things, but we spoke for a long while with a park ranger stationed outside Hoover's reconstructed two-room boyhood home, where we picked his brain about Hoover's reasons for being ineffective despite being the "Great Humanitarian." In West Branch, they're all fans of a usually disliked figure, so I get the sense that they enjoy getting to dig into the details of his life.

-----About a half-hour's drive from West Branch is the Quad Cities area, and we were after a pennant from the Quad Cities River Bandits, whose historically located stadium—literally right across the train tracks, and with a view of the Mississippi River and Illinois beyond—was ranked the best in the Minor Leagues by USA Today. Its size and amenities made me guess at least Double-A, but they were in fact Single-A. The three people with whom we shared interaction had the kinds of monotone voices that could put inanimate objects to sleep, and I realized then that they weren't bored or upset with us ... it was—unfortunately—just the way they talked.

-----The ticket office guy sent us inside, where the secretary gave a call to someone else, who came down the steps and shuttled us up the elevator to the team store on the main concourse. Their hats were quite cool and we got one for that collection as well as our requisite pennant. Their store even had an enormous bobblehead of their mascot, who cheers on a team that the man who checked us out called "somewhat competitive." They even had a lounge—well, an upscale bar—on the concourse behind home plate, where motion-filled quasi-abstract paintings of River Bandits players adorned the brick walls.

-----Upon returning to our car, I'm sure those involved with the process of getting us in to get our pennant were stunned—for several completely silent hours, no doubt—about the fact that three people came in with actual inflections in their voices. (Perish the thought!)

-----We went over a rather rickety-looking bridge—which we were told was erected before American involvement in World War II—and went into Illinois. We ended up going through three of the Quad Cities. Illinois, though it may be about to default on its debt, still has room for expansive road construction segments all over I-74, and there were seemingly more of those infernal things than actual road—which was itself in bad shape. I've seen better Yukon roads, and I shouldn't have to say that.

-----After skirting around Peoria, we got gas in the town of Carlock, which is quite a funny name for a place to get gas. It wasn't long thereafter that we reached the Champaign-Urbana area, where we got the scenic tour of about two miles through the heart of downtown. I can't figure the place out, as derelict buildings and questionable characters are perhaps only a few hundred feet from extremely affluent sections of uppity restaurants and outdoor concerts. The whole place, as far as I've seen, is a patchwork city.

-----We drove through the local Culver's. We had every intention of getting out and going inside, but several large families were already in there and we could see writhing masses of children cooped up inside. What really sealed the deal against going inside was a girl who let out a blood-curdling scream at us while being driven by, apparently just for kicks. Crazed Champaigners were not the kinds of Champaigners with which we wanted to interact.

-----Tomorrow: we finally get that pesky Indianapolis pennant en route to Lexington, Kentucky.