catching up

We decided Mike had to see a dentist. Apparently no root canal specialists and few regular dentists work on Fridays. We finally found a walk-in place in Terre Haute, Indiana, some 40 miles away, but en route. By 2 pm it had been determined that Mike needs a root canal. However, the dentist also thought, given our situation, that with antibiotics and pain medication, he might be able to last the trip without the procedure. By 3 pm we were back on the road with the prescription meds.

We talked with some people at a rest stop on the way to St. Louis. They advised strongly against going through St. Louis at the very height of the rush hour and also warned that the Arch Park was having many car break-ins recently. But even more important, they were very familiar with old Route 66 (the theme of our trip - based on an old TV show and the pre-interstate highway from Chicago to California; much of it is undrivable now and what there is has been re-numbered, so it is hard to find and great to have local information on it) and told us that an alternate route around St. Louis would bring us to some historic sections of 66.

So we changed our plans and went in that direction. (We were able to see the Arch way off in the distance and made some feeble attempts to take a picture of it from the moving car.) After a little confusion we found the sections while driving into the lowering sun, so many of the pictures we took didn't work out. However, it was fun and something that was an integral part of our trip, so it was great.

At the end of the day we ended up in St. Clair, Missouri ... happy, but way off our intended path. The next morning we planned to continue on 66.

By morning, after having studied different maps, we changed our minds and decided that we must head back north to get back on track because we were already well behind our basic schedule. At the breakfast nook at the motel, we talked with someone who gave us great info for later on about some places in the high deserts of Nevada where there are old mines and ghost towns and wild horses and burros. We are going to try to get there when the time comes.

So we started out with a big goal: to make it to Sioux City, Iowa, by nightfall, so that we would be close enough to make some of our South Dakota stops by early afternoon on Sunday. We did it. We've pretty much split up the driving, but this day Mike ended up doing more than his share as I was exhausted and haven't been sleeping enough.

I am quite happy to report that although we ran into a major traffic tie up about ten miles from Kansas City, we exited the interstate and made a long but successful detour on roads unmarked on our maps using the sun and some luck on surprisingly twisty roads in that flat part of the country (meaning there were no mountains in the distance to use as guide points).

I should also mention that the seemingless endless road construction is going on everywhere.

I've also included pictures of some processing plants that presumably are agricultural in nature. They are huge! Maybe one of you can identify the particular functions of these plants? I don't know the answer and at this point don't have the time to research the question.