Effing Ham at Effingham

It’s Christmas Eve, and what are we doing? We’re driving home from Ohio. Sue’s mom passed away in the early morning hours of December 20, and her funeral was yesterday. We’ve been in Ohio since December 9. It’s been a long few weeks—yet much, much too short, too. . . . We’re just tired.

Tired and dazed. It will be so good to be home again, sleep in our own bed, be reunited with our kitties, and see if the world won’t start spinning on its axis again at some point. One thing’s for sure: 2020 will be an unusual year.

Over the many years we’ve driven to Ohio to visit Sue’s people, we’ve always had to drive through Effingham, Illinois. In recent years, it’s had so much highway construction, it’s been a real pain. All those lanes of traffic, merging interstates, exit and entrance ramps, and people driving like idiots. Many of them are, as Sue calls them, Ill-annoying drivers.

Time was, Effingham was a place where we’d plan to stop, knowing there were so many options for gas and fast food. But for years, now, it’s a place, like Indianapolis, that we just want to get through. We’ll stop almost anywhere before or after it, but our goal for a long time has been to slip through this gantlet of crazy traffic as efficiently as possible. And the monstrously gigantic, tacky roadside cross is not something we particularly like to see. I’m a Christian, but really—though I’m sure it was erected with all good intentions, it makes me cringe. And as a sign of Effingham’s impending traffic, it’s rather ominous: “oh boy, here we go.”

So, Effingham. We’ve taken to calling it “effing, effing, Effingham.” As in, “seventeen miles to effing, effing, Effingham—do you wanna stop and get gas before it, or after?”

(The image above is a screen capture from Google street view.)

But tonight, we made an exception. I think we’ve set a land speed record, this trip, returning from Ohio. We simply haven’t stopped much at all. But around Terre Haute, we realized we were getting peckish, also a little slap-happy. It occurred to us we wanted comfort food, home cookin’—breakfast. And we knew there’s a Denny’s in Effingham. You can always count on Denny’s, huh?

Slap-happy plus peckish equals hilarity; from Terre Haute to central Illinois, it became our mantra: Hey, let’s get some effing ham at Effingham!

And that’s just what we did.

It totally hit the spot, and it tickled us, too. I had to post about it on Facebook.

And the coffee was completely welcome. And the people who work at places like this, on Christmas Eve, serving people like us, are doing the work of God. Our gratitude knows no bounds. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

. . . So very looking forward to getting home.