June 27th, 2001

Into St. Louis...

Woke up relatively early and prepared to travel into St. Louis. We've decided that once we get into St. Louis we're going to call it an early night so we can catch up on sleep and spend a good chunk of the day tommorrow checking out the Gateway Arch.

Interstate 70 from Topeka to Kansas City is a toll road. Being the cheap punks that we are, we decide to take Highway 24 east, which runs largely parallel to the Interstate. The drive was pretty uneventful. There does seems to be a LOT of construction taking place all over the Highways we've been taking everywhere on this trip. It causes more of an annoyance than any real delays, but still.

Grand Hoover has been behaving wonderfully. In a way, I'll almost regret having to give him up. On the plus side, the second leg of the trip will be considerably looser in terms of when we'll have to be places. And "Herb" will have his car back.

The plan at this point is to spend two days in St. Louis, and leave from there to Chicago to drop off the car. We're renting another car to get us around the city some when we first get there... primarily to get us to my Aunt and Uncle's place in the Chicago suburbs. (Hi Pam and Jock!) It sounds like all my cousins will be around to visit with as well. I'm rather looking forward to this, I haven't seen my cousins in over a year... and it's been probably... 4 years or so since I've seen my Aunt and Uncle. It's particularly bad since I really don't live that far away from them now, living in Iowa and all. I'll have to fix that.

At any rate, the drive to Kansas City is pretty boring. Alie has decided she wants to tackle driving through Kansas City. I figure, what the hell. We take Highway 40 just beyond the toll section of the Interstate, then join back up with I-70 just outside of the city. We wade into Kansas City. Traffic is heavy, but not awful. Alie actually got us through the city without cutting off too many people or causing any multi-car pile-ups. She gets a gold star for driving today.

As we cross into Missouri traffic comes to a near standstill. I see signs for Interstate leading up into Iowa (into Des Moines, specifically). We also spot a McGee street, so we have to get a picture of that, since this is the first street named after Alie we've ever seen.

I'm working in my iBook during the drive, trying to get website updates caught up since I've been running behind for this entire trip.

Once we get out of Kansas City the drive again becomes pretty boring. Alie's had enough of cities for the day, so I get to navigate St. Louis. As we make our approach we see a large front of storms moving in from the South. Oh that's just lovely.

We pull off the Interstate and I take over driving. As we cruise I-70 traffic grinds to a complete halt. A few minutes later, the rain starts. Lots of it... a full out thunderstorm. The sun gets blotted out and it's dark as night outside. Lighting and thunder crackle and boom all around. Traffic is bumper to bumper for mile upon mile. I start having Los Angeles flashbacks.

We spend about 2 1/2 hours in varying degrees of heavy to gridlocked traffic until we find a hotel to crash at.

We'd debated going out in the evening to cruise around the city and see a few things, but traffic is bumper to bumper well past 9pm. To hell with that.

Tommorrow, the Gateway Arch.