Day 1: June 8, 2014
Special Relativity

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I entered Indiana behind a car with Nebraska plates and considered following it for a couple of days but it quickly out paced me. Clouds in front of me coupled with the rising sun at my back produced some interesting lighting on I-74. That seemed like a good sign and I'm pretty sure that encountering an Edsel within the first hundred miles of a road trip brings good luck so I thought it possible that I had dodged the rain. That turned out not to be the case as I encountered several miles of heavy mist then some real rain as I approached Indianapolis.

I saw my first Uniroyal Gal less than three weeks ago and now I've seen nearly a fifth of them (2 of 11). When you're hot, you're hot and yes she is. This beauty is in Peoria, Illinois, at an actual Uniroyal store.

The Roadside America app on my GPS had led me to the Uniroyal Gal and I checked it again as I headed out of town to see what might lie ahead. When I saw that the world's largest scale model of the solar system was barely a mile off of my course, that's where I headed. The location that the GPS flagged had been, but was no longer, the center of the model. Until sometime in 2013, the Sol of the solar system model was the partial disk on the side of the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences. It is now a full disk beside the Riverfront Museum. Finding the new Sol was easy. Finding Earth was a bear. A nearby sign told how far away other objects were but not the direction. No one I asked, including museum staff at the front desk, could tell me where Earth was and few even knew what I was talking about. My Sol to Earth odyssey was a long and frustrating one which I won't bore you with but will say that some major effort went into getting a photo of the five inch sphere.

Roadside America points out that, in addition to being the world's largest, this solar system model is the only one with a lady (the Uniroyal Gal) measuring 142-95-142 between Saturn and Uranus. Those numbers represent thousands of miles.


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