To St. Louis

Caitlin had to leave pretty early the next morning.  She makes the drive back to Vienna all in one go (it's about a 12 hour drive), so she needed to head out with plenty of time to get home.  However Katie and I had our shortest day (horray!) and were in no particular rush.

Today we were going from Decatur to St. Louis, MO.  We had the whole day to do it, but it is only supposed to take about 2.5 hours.  So with that in mind Katie and I felt free to wander at will. This was sort of the beginning of the "trip" part.  The other days we were trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible, but today we weren't as fussed.

So we continued driving (the wheels turned, we moved forward, life moved on).  As we went Katie saw a sign for historic Route 66 which we immediately decided to go on (look at us making snap decisions, we're growing already!).  It was really cool to be driving on 66 since we've heard so much about it (also, it's in one of the songs we've listened to, so bonus points for a good trip mix).  The road was narrower than I expected (one lane each way), a bit twisty, and had a speed limit of 55 which felt slow compared to the 70ish I was doing when we were on the highway (yes, I speed).

On Historic Route 66

Katie was disappointed about the lack of touristy places along the road.  We were hoping for some shop to sell post cards (of course), and possibly have some directions to something vaguely interesting.  (Katie keeps talking about following signs to the World's Largest Ball of String.)  Although there weren't any such shops we stopped at a gas station along 66 which had signs near by for us to take pictures of.

The only downside of driving on 66 was my GPS (fondly referred to as Garmin), which has no concept of "take me along a scenic route that will get me to my destination eventually, but not necessarily the fastest way" (if you know how to do that, PLEASE let us know!).  So the whole time we were meandering around on 66 poor Garmin was freaking out and telling us to get on the nearest highway.  It wouldn't have mattered too much, but because we don't have a paper map or any way to know where 66 was taking us we ended up going East on 66 for a little bit.  We knew we were doing it, so we turned around when we got bored of the farms near by.  Eventually I started to follow Garmin (Katie and I switched driving at a gas station), and at the same point it started raining.

I'm not sure what I was thinking of, but I hadn't really thought about weather issues for the trip.  Somehow I was only remember Little House on the Prairie and not Twister.  I just expected clear sky, sunshine, and light breezes.  Which was dumb because another friend of mine is storm chasing right now.  We're driving around in Tornado Alley (not today, but during our trip), there's going to be bad weather.  It just hadn't really occurred to me.  Anyways, it was raining.  I'm not sure if I don't have a lot of experience driving in the rain on highways, or if it's a more western thing, but those rain drops hit the car HARD.  It was like they were heavier than normal rain drops.  The whole thing made us a little worried (Katie checked the weather on her phone for warnings), and we briefly discussed what to do if there was a tornado (official answer: get into a ditch and hold onto something).  But we were fine, and no harm done (actually, it was good because I now have a fairly clean car).

We eventually got to Katie's aunt's house.  We had the rest of the day to chill and get up to date on things (like blog posts).  It was wonderful.  I took a nap.  We both downloaded photos from our cameras.  We had dinner. And we wrote some posts.  A vacation afternoon, and a very nice break from driving.

Day's Map