COLUMN: Scenic Drive

You'll never believe what happened to me the other day. Hard to believe, but I actually got to have a little bit of a weekend with my weekend.

More often than not, my weekends are just slightly discolored weekdays -- 48 hours when I get to take off my newspaper hat and instead put on my DJ hat. Any way you look at it, I'm still working. What little free time I have is often spent cleaning the house, doing laundry, buying groceries, and generally performing all those mundane responsible-adult tasks that may as well be considered work, just without that cumbersome burden of getting paid for any of it.

Sometimes, I don't want to wear the newspaper hat, the DJ hat, or the responsible adult hat. Sometimes I just wanna hang my hats up for a bit.

That's what I did last weekend. I went for a scenic drive. Specifically, a Spoon River Valley Scenic Drive.

Every year, Knox and Fulton Counties in Illinois hold a fall festival of beautiful vistas, scenic overlooks, harvest bounties, and a colorful spectacle of autumnal wonder and merriment. Or at least I bet that's what the brochures say.

In reality, it's pretty much just a yard sale. A really, really big yard sale. 

I grew up in Knox County, and Scenic Drive weekends were always a tradition in my family. In fact, outside of Christmas, the day we went Scenic Driving was usually my favorite day of the year. I'd stake my claim to the back seat of the mini-van, crank some roadtrip tunes on the headphones, and let the pavement -- or at least my dad -- guide us to wonder.

The main wonder, of course, being: "Who would buy any of this junk?"

I adore the Knox County and Spoon River Valley Scenic Drives, but let's be honest. There's not a whole lot of scenery along the main route, unless your idea of scenery is plastic tables and piles of rusty antiques. Basically, it's an excuse for everyone in Knox and Fulton Counties to go through their homes, find all the rusty garbage in their basements, and see if anyone's weird enough to pay money for it.

And I love it. I can waste an entire day wandering around amateur junk vendors, and if I can do so with an elephant ear and a lemon shake-up in my hands, all the better.

There's all kinds of different stuff to see, do, and buy along the Scenic Drive. There's crafters who must spend the rest of their year making stuff to sell just for this 4-day annual festival. There's a limitless supply of homemade jams, jellies, honey, and assorted things floating in vinegar and brine. There's antique dealers galore. There's people selling junk and people selling deep-fried junk. It's every Midwestern stereotype served up on a platter, often with powdered sugar sprinkled over the top. It's great.

I had limited time and limited objectives this year. I wanted apple cider, a hot donut, and a homemade pie to take home. All three of those were found in the tiny town of London Mills, a stop so popular on the Scenic Drive that it can back up traffic on the highway for over a mile. The vendors were on their A-game. There was a guy selling homemade root beer out of a barrel. There was a woman yelling "TAMALES! IF YOU DON'T LIKE THEM, YOU DON'T PAY!" In perhaps a sign of the changing times, there was more than one tent selling CBD oil and, umm, "decorative" glass pipes.

And there was junk. Oh, how there was junk. I fully appreciate the lure of food vendors and homemade jams, but I'll never wrap my head around table after after of rusty antiques in shoddy condition. I realize to some people it's a treasure trove, and I won't begin to argue the appeal of rusty antiques in the homeland of American Pickers, but I don't get it.

Case in point: At one stall this weekend, they were selling the beat-up remnants of a 1970's KerPlunk game for $8. Remember KerPlunk? Once upon a time, in the days before X-Box and Playstation, the height of gaming was pulling plastic straws from a transparent tube in hopes of not disloging the pile of marbles atop them. If you pulled the wrong straw, marbles would drop to the bottom of the tube, making a noise that sounded NOTHING like "ker-plunk."

It was, and still is, great fun. But THIS particular eight-dollar vintage Kerplunk game only had ONE remaining straw. Spoiler alert, but that's not going to stop too many marbles. That's okay, though, because the marbles were missing, too. Basically this guy was selling a plastic tube and a single piece of straw for eight bucks. Here's another spoiler alert: They still make KerPlunk. You can buy a brand new model at Wal-Mart for $14.95. I bet it has all the marbles, all the straws, and doesn't smell like it's been in someone's attic since 1963.

But again, I won't knock antique sellers. Maybe there's someone out there getting ready to open a board-game-themed microbrewery in need of a kitschy KerPlunk wall sconce (and if you're out there, hit me up -- I can cut you a deal on Broken Broken Hungry Hungry Hippo that's somewhere in my closet.) 

All told, the day made for a great escape. Pro tip: the main routes of the Spoon River Valley Scenic Drive might not be especially scenic, but the side roads ARE. We detoured off the main drag and got a fair share of fall foliage and fresh air. I even made a long-overdue detour to the rural cemetery where I could say hi to my grandparents and a good portion of my mom's family tree. It's a really nice place, except for the incessant barking dog in the distance that I reckon my grandpa routinely cusses out from the great beyond.

The world may change, but as long as the Spoon River continues to flow, so will the smell of fried food wafting up from Fulton County every fall. Here's hoping our children's children's children will enjoy the Knox County and Spoon River Valley Scenic Drives. They might even have a chance to buy that same KerPlunk tube. 

Enough talking. I have pie to eat.