Day Two on the road, Wednesday, June 23, took us out of Indianapolis, after stopping for gas, a fridge magnet and a lottery ticket. (I always get a lottery ticket when I'm passing through states with a lottery.) It was a beautiful morning. The local radio stations were all talking about the upcoming Indianapolis 500 race that coming weekend. Friends had been concerned about us being able to find motel rooms in Indianapolis because of the race. We crossed over "Nameless Creek."

The Indianapolis skyline as we headed out of town.

Interstate 70 is a major transportation artery between the East Coast and the Midwest. There was traffic all the time.

...It was a yellow Tonka toy dump truck. I thought, somebody's daddy loves them very much.

At Exit 208, we passed a sign for the Underground Railroad Museum, and it seemed odd that it should be so far north. I didn't have my camera ready, or I would have taken a picture of the sign that read FLUSHING BETHESDA. One thing I noticed about Ohio highways was that there's not as much signage. Out west, any time you cross over a river or creek, there's a sign to tell you what it was. Not so in Ohio. In fact, we had to stop and look at a map to see that we had crossed the Ohio River, and that we were in West Virginia. We stopped in the town of Wheeling, and after getting more gas, we decided to get a bite to eat. We gave the guys some money and let them eat at a Burger King while my wife and I walked across the parking lot to eat at the Subway. It was a nice little lunch. We passed a Goodyear dealership appropriately named Wheeling Tires. We headed into Pennsylvania, where the interstate was named the World War II Veterans Memorial Highway.

The rolling hills of western Pennsylvania.

 
About an hour later, we made a pit stop outside of New Stanton, where I picked up a great map of the eastern U.S. There was a lot of construction to get around. We were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We passed near the town of Acme. On the western side of Everett, Pennsylvania, I-70 turns south, but we continued east on I-76, which we followed into Harrisburg. We weren't sure how far it was because there were no signs. My wife figured the state must just assume everybody knows how far things are from each other. For long stretches of highway, however, they had emergency call boxes every mile; that was a good idea. The highway went through a tunnel, and when we emerged on the other side, a sign announced we were in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. We stopped for gas at the midway terminal on the turnpike.
 

There were more tunnels ahead on the highway. Right before the Tuskadora Tunnel, a sign asked "Sunglasses off?" After passing through the Kittatinny Mountain Tunnel, there was about 50 yards of space before entering the Blue Mountain Tunnel. There's seven tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, with a combined length of nearly seven miles. West to east, the tunnels are:   Laurel Hill Tunnel: Length: 4,541 ft.   Allegheny Mountain Tunnel: Length: 6,070 ft.   Ray's Hill Tunnel: Length: 3,532 ft.   Sideling Hill Tunnel: Length: 6,782 ft.   Tuscorora Mountain Tunnel: Length: 5,326 ft.   Kittatinny Mountain Tunnel: Length: 4,727 ft.   Blue Mountain Tunnel: Length: 4,339 ft.

We started getting road signs after that. We arrived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania at 7:30 Oklahoma time and stopped at the Red Roof Inn. The hotel was admittedly on the economy side, with no pool or exercise room or fancy bottles of shampoo in the bathroom --and the cleaning staff left a vacuum cleaner in the hallway-- but the price was almost half what everyone else in town was charging. The hotel also didn't have a restaurant, but there was a couple of restaurants across the street and an old-fashioned diner down on the corner. It was low-budget, but it did the job.