Where's Betty (and Bill)?: Trip to Boise: Crossville to Lone Jack

It's been a few days since my last post. We stayed in Crossville, Tennessee, a couple of extra days to be able to attend the funeral of the father of my best friend in Lawrenceville, Georgia - about a 4 hour drive away.

We left Crossville on Tuesday, August 4, and drove through incredible heat. When we stopped at a rest area in Paducah, Kentucky, the temperature was 105 degrees. We drove on another 45 minutes to
Whittington Woods Campground in Whittington, Illinois, and stayed the two hottest contiguous days and nights on record there without satellite reception due to the density of trees in the campground. Had to revert to the antenna for local channels only, but the shade helped.

During our full day in the area, we tried to locate Tom Ryan, a lost friend of Bill's whose last known address as of 1975 was in Benton, Illinois. Benton is a farming community of around 7,000 people a little south of Whittington. The last public hanging in Illinois occurred there in 1928, when Charlie Birger, a Prohibition gangster, was hanged for the murder of Joe Adams, the mayor of the nearby town of West City.

In 1963, George Harrison of the Beatles stayed at his sister's home in Benton while on vacation. The house has become the Hard Day's Night Bed and Breakfast. He also sat in with a local band, "The Four Vests," at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in nearby Eldorado, Illinois.

In our search for Tom Ryan, we visited the Benton Chamber of Commerce, then the library, where we went back over old telephone books from the 1970's with no luck. Then we tried driving out to the Walmart off of I-57 where Bill had parked his 18-wheeler and Tom had picked him up by motorcycle in 1975. Bill remembered enough of the route of the motorcycle trip to get us to what he thought was the right area, but either his memory was wrong or the house had been torn down.

We left Whittington for the Lake Paradise RV Resort north of Lone Jack, Missouri, on Thursday, August 5. This is our second Coast-to-Coast campground. The site is on a hill with a great view of one of the many lakes in the campground. Nothing between us and the satellite but empty sky. Our only complaint is that the site is rather steep and rocky, so it took some doing to get the rig level.

We are staying here a total of 12 nights. We plan to poke around the Long Jack area while we are here. If we find anything interesting, I will post.