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| Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Missouri |
Our previous published story ended among the yellow sandstone walls of Jaisalmer and its Sonar Kella. That was the last post from a different trip to India. The road toward this expedition had one short American intermission: our February drive from Germantown to Hamden and back along the East Coast.
By summer 2024, Shehzadi, our Toyota Tundra, was packed for our Pan-American expedition. This first part follows our opening two-day run from Hyattsville, Maryland, to St. Louis, Missouri. An earlier transcontinental USA and Canada overland trip had already taught us that North America expands faster than a dashboard map suggests. Apparently, we required another demonstration.
Trans-America Overland Part 1 — Post Summary
We begin the summer 2024 Pan-American expedition by driving Shehzadi west from the Washington, DC, area to St. Louis. The route crosses the Appalachian folds at Sideling Hill, follows transportation corridors shaped by Indigenous paths and the National Road, pauses in Dublin, and continues through Columbus, Indianapolis, Terre Haute, and Effingham. Along the way, geology, canals, railroads, local legends, giant sandwiches, a famous bottle, and several million bricks explain why I-70 carries far more history than its road signs can reasonably fit.
| What's Covered | |
| 🧭 | Route at a Glance — Hyattsville to St. Louis through seven states |
| 🚙 | Hyattsville to Hagerstown — Capital Beltway, I-270, and Maryland crossroads |
| ⛰️ | Hancock, Sideling Hill, and Cumberland — folded rock, I-68, canal and road history |
| 🛣️ | Washington, Pennsylvania to Dublin — Route 43 corridor and the National Road |
| 🍕 | Dublin and Columbus — local lore, Irish festival history, planned capital, and Ohio food |
| 🏁 | Indianapolis and Terre Haute — the Brickyard, pork tenderloin, US 40, and Coke-bottle history |
| 🌽 | Effingham to St. Louis — corn, soybeans, interstate junctions, and the Mississippi River |
| ➡️ | Next Stop — St. Louis riverboat, Gateway Arch tram, Kansas City, and Topeka |
We drove Shehzadi from Hyattsville, Maryland, to St. Louis, Missouri, over two days, using the Capital Beltway, I-270, I-68, the Route 43 corridor, and I-70. The route carried us across Maryland, a corner of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois before the Mississippi River announced Missouri with the subtlety of a major continental drainage system. We covered about 840 miles, with Dublin, Ohio, serving as the overnight stop.
Route: Hyattsville → Hagerstown → Hancock → Cumberland → Washington, Pennsylvania → Dublin → Columbus → Indianapolis → Terre Haute → Effingham → St. Louis
Method: Overland by road in Shehzadi
Distance and time: About 840 miles over two days
Vehicle: Shehzadi, our 2024 Toyota Tundra
Route at a Glance
- Hyattsville: flag-off near Washington, DC, with 6,395 miles on Shehzadi's odometer.
- Hagerstown: Maryland's old wagon, rail, and interstate crossroads.
- Hancock: the Potomac corridor and the eastern approach to I-68.
- Sideling Hill: a road cut through folded early Mississippian rock.
- Cumberland: starting point of the National Road and western end of the C&O Canal.
- Washington, Pennsylvania: the return to I-70 after the Route 43 corridor.
- Dublin: our overnight stop beside the Scioto River.
- Columbus: Ohio's planned capital at the Scioto and Olentangy rivers.
- Indianapolis: state-capital grids, the Speedway, and Hoosier food lore.
- Terre Haute and Effingham: two different claims to being crossroads, both supported by an impressive quantity of pavement.
- St. Louis: the Mississippi River and Gateway Arch at the end of Part 1.
Hyattsville to Hagerstown: Leaving the Capital Beltway
We left Hyattsville early and joined I-495, then I-270 northwest. Hyattsville sits close enough to Washington, DC, to inherit the capital's traffic without receiving any of its marble monuments as compensation. The lanes thinned beyond the suburbs, and the Blue Ridge and Appalachian ridges began to replace office parks on the horizon.
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| Shehzadi's Odometer at flag-off from Hyattsville, MD: 6,395 miles |
Shehzadi's odometer showed 6,395 miles at flag-off. The first day's reading would reach 6,817 miles in Dublin, a 422-mile run before hotel arithmetic became more important than heroic intent.
Hagerstown made sense as the first major western marker. The city was founded in 1762 by Jonathan Hager and first called Elizabethtowne. Its location joined the Indigenous Warrior Trading Path, now followed in part by US 11, with the National Road corridor, now US 40. Rail lines later spread from the city like wheel spokes, producing the nickname Hub City. Modern I-70 and I-81 merely arrived and discovered that everyone else had already chosen the junction.
Hagerstown also preserves a food tradition older than the interstate system by a comfortable margin. City records date its farmers market to 1773, before Hagerstown was incorporated. We did not stop to inspect the baked goods, which was an error of scheduling rather than judgment.
Hancock, Sideling Hill, and Cumberland: A Road Through Folded Time
West of Hagerstown, the Potomac River closes in near Hancock and I-68 begins its climb across the Valley and Ridge province. The interstate is young. The rock is less impressed. At Sideling Hill, highway construction exposed a great syncline, a downward fold whose hard central sandstone now forms a ridge because the softer rock around it eroded faster. A structural low became a topographic high. Geology has never felt obliged to keep its filing system intuitive.
The exposed Rockwell and Purslane formations were laid down about 330 to 345 million years ago. Sandstone, shale, siltstone, claystone, and thin coaly layers curve across the cut in a diagram large enough to inconvenience traffic. The Appalachians formed through repeated continental collisions and erosion; I-68 supplied the cross-section and several warning signs.
Cumberland sits where the Potomac finds a mountain gateway. The city became a transportation hinge between the Atlantic seaboard and the interior. Congress authorized the National Road in 1806, and construction began in Cumberland in 1811. It was the first highway built entirely with federal funds and eventually reached Vandalia, Illinois. The federal government had discovered road building and, for a while, was quite enthusiastic.
Cumberland also became the western terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Canal boats carried coal, flour, iron, and limestone products east while railroads gathered around the same gap. The city's official history describes a place that grew from an American Indian village and frontier outpost into a road, canal, and rail hub. Our Tundra required none of the towpath's mules, though they may have objected to the comparison.
We continued west on I-68 toward Morgantown, then used WV 43 and Pennsylvania Turnpike 43 north. The modern Route 43 corridor crosses US 40, the old National Road, before joining I-70 near Washington, Pennsylvania. The route names changed. The old east-west job did not.
Washington, Pennsylvania to Dublin: Following the National Road West
I-70 carried us from southwestern Pennsylvania into Ohio, following the same broad movement that had drawn wagons, stagecoaches, livestock, mail, and freight west along the National Road. The original federal road was built from rocks and gravel broken by hand and laid in trenches. This gives pothole complaints useful historical perspective, although not enough perspective to make potholes pleasant.
The Appalachian folds softened into Ohio's rolling country as evening approached. We reached Dublin, northwest of Columbus, and stopped at the Red Roof PLUS+. It was not a caravanserai, but it had parking, plumbing, and no known requirement to feed the horses.
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| Red Roof PLUS+, Columbus - Dublin |
Dublin's name sounds more Irish than its early population was. John Sells laid out the village in 1810 and asked surveyor John Shields to name it. Shields chose Dublin after his home in Ireland, while the city's history notes that few Irish families joined the original German and European settlers. Branding had arrived before demographics, which later became a dependable civic technique.
The same city history keeps several excellent local stories in circulation: the memorial to Wyandot leader Leatherlips, a tale that Dublin lost its chance to become Ohio's capital in a poker game, and the growth of the Dublin Irish Festival from a small gathering on Coffman Park tennis courts into a major annual event. A town can begin with mills, quarrying, taverns, and farm traffic, then add kilts and bagpipes two centuries later. Municipal evolution is patient work.
We ate dinner at a local pub and stopped for the night. No leprechauns were involved. The paperwork would have been unbearable.
Dublin and Columbus: Irish Names, Ohio Politics, and Food Worth a Detour
The next morning, Shehzadi's odometer showed 6,817 miles. Coffee handled the humans. Fuel handled the truck. We returned to I-70 through the Columbus metropolitan area.
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| Shehzadi's Odometer at Dublin, Ohio: 6,817 miles |
Columbus was created for government. The city was founded in 1812 at the confluence of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers after Ohio's capital had moved between Chillicothe and Zanesville. State officials wanted a central permanent seat, and Columbus became the capital in 1816. It began as a planned answer to a political problem, then grew large enough to produce several new political problems of its own.
The National Road reached central Ohio and helped connect the new capital with eastern markets. Railroads and canals followed, while German immigrants shaped neighborhoods, brewing, baking, sausage making, and the brick streets of German Village. The city's food identity now includes thin, edge-to-edge Columbus-style pizza cut into squares. Cutting a round pizza into squares creates corner pieces with no crust and center pieces with no handle. Ohio accepted the challenge and continued eating.
We did not stop in Columbus on this pass. The city remained outside the windows as I-70 carried us west. The choice preserved time and sacrificed pizza, a bargain whose wisdom remains under review.
Indianapolis and Terre Haute: Bricks, Tenderloins, and the Original Crossroads
Indianapolis appeared after the long farm belt of eastern Indiana. The state chose the centrally located site for its capital in the 1820s, and surveyors laid out the Mile Square around a circular governor's residence. The governor never lived there. The circle survived and became Monument Circle, proving that failed residential planning can mature into civic symbolism.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway sits west of downtown inside the Town of Speedway, not beside I-70. We therefore waved in principle. The track was built in 1909 as a shared testing facility for the local automobile industry. Its first crushed-stone-and-tar surface proved inadequate, so the owners repaved the 2.5-mile oval with 3.2 million bricks. The Brickyard nickname was less a marketing invention than a materials inventory.
Indiana's breaded pork tenderloin sandwich follows a similar theory of scale. The pork is pounded thin, breaded, fried, and placed on a bun that often looks less like a container than a modest hat. We did not stop for one, but the local food canon remained beside the route, quietly judging our schedule.
Farther west, Terre Haute sits on the Wabash River at the historic junction of US 40 and US 41, the meeting that established its Crossroads of America identity. I-70 now carries the east-west traffic south of downtown, but US 40 still crosses the city as Wabash Avenue.
Terre Haute also produced an object recognized almost everywhere. In 1915, the Root Glass Company designed and patented the Coca-Cola contour bottle, intended to be identified by touch in the dark or even as broken glass. The designers reportedly mistook an illustration of a cocoa pod for the cola nut and gained the bottle's ribbed curves from the error. It is reassuring when the wrong plant produces the right bottle.
Effingham to St. Louis: The Corn Belt Meets the Mississippi
Indiana and Illinois flattened into broad fields of corn and soybeans. USDA figures for 2024 counted millions of planted acres in both states, so the repetition outside the windows was not a failure of imagination. It was agricultural scale. Grain elevators rose above towns like secular steeples, marking where harvests became storage, rail loads, feed, fuel, and commodity contracts.
Effingham formed the next road landmark where I-57 and I-70 meet. The city promotes the junction without excessive modesty, but the geometry supports the claim. Nearby, the Cross at the Crossroads rises 198 feet with arms spanning 113 feet. Construction began in 2001 after local organizers drew inspiration from a similar cross in Groom, Texas. It is difficult to miss, which appears to have been part of the engineering brief.
The name Effingham also sounds like a Victorian attempt to avoid swearing in front of the children. We passed through without testing that theory on residents.
I-70 continued across Illinois toward East St. Louis. The fields yielded to warehouses, rail yards, bridges, and the broad Mississippi River. St. Louis grew as a river port and distribution point, sending goods and people up the Missouri and toward the interior. The road we had followed from Cumberland reached a city whose economic life had long depended on movement west.
We crossed the Mississippi as the Gateway Arch rose above the riverfront. Eero Saarinen's 630-foot monument commemorates St. Louis's role in westward expansion, but Part 1 ended with arrival rather than inspection. The riverboat, the Arch tram, and the view from the top belonged to the next day. Even monuments need boundaries between blog posts.
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| Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Missouri |
This opening leg traced several generations of American movement. Indigenous trading paths helped define early crossings. The National Road brought federally funded construction west from Cumberland. Canals and railroads concentrated freight at mountain gaps and river towns. US 40 and the interstates inherited much of the same work. We had crossed the Appalachians and the Corn Belt on modern pavement, but the route was old long before anyone painted a shield marked I-70.
Next Stop: St. Louis, Kansas City, and Topeka
Our earlier Maryland-to-Alberta overland route had also carried us west across the continent, but this expedition was turning toward a different southern arc. First, St. Louis required its own day.
Part 2 continues with a sunset cruise on the Tom Sawyer, the tram to the top of the Gateway Arch, and the westbound drive through Kansas City to Topeka. The Arch had spent the evening posing beside the Mississippi. The next morning, it expected us to climb inside it. Architecture can become demanding once encouraged.
Reference route map of The Vagabond Couple's USA and Mexico overland roundtrip: Map-1 and Map-2.
— The Vagabond Couple and Shehzadi
