Tuesday was the day we drove from Kansas City, KS to Louisville, KY. We left KC at nine in the morning or so, and got to Elizabethtown, KY (forty miles south of Louisville, but closer to Ft. Knox) at two in the morning on Wednesday. It’s only an eight or nine hour drive, but it took us 17 hours, with good reasons.
Toto and I left KC earlyish. We headed straight to St. Louis. St. Louis is the biggest reason it took us so long to drive that day. It took about four hours to get to St. Louis from KC, and we spent about five hours in St. Louis goofing off. First and foremost was the Gateway Arch on the waterfront.
It was amazing. That is the best way to describe it. Amazing. As Toto said, “The golden arches aint got nothing on this arch!” There is this whole huge park around it which is pretty, and then there is a HUGE underground museum underneath the arch itself. There are two theaters where they show educational videos on the arch and the Lewis and Clark Expedition; there is a museum all about the L&C Expedition (which we did not go into since we know the story of L&C pretty well); there are two little trams that take you to the top of the arch; there is a gift shop (of course) and there was something else next to the ticket booth that I can not remember what it was. We bought tickets to one of the films and one of the trams. The film was a documentary about the building process of the arch. I argued with Toto jokingly that it was Tuesday and she was making me watch a documentary (I took a film studies class this term that I did not love, and it was on Tuesday nights and all we watched were documentaries), but she wanted to so we did it. I actually dozed off towards the end. It wasn’t long or even that boring, but I was tired from lack of sleep and the room was dark and warm. After the film, we went in the tram to the top of the arch. There are several factors to the coolness of this bit of the day. First off, the inside of the little tram cars looked like UFO’s so it ties in directly with the whole going to Roswell, NM thing.
Second, the view from the top was fantastic. It was raining when we went down into the vault of the museum but by the time we watched the film and rode the tram up it was sunny outside. We could see for miles. I think Toto enjoyed it a tad more than I did though because me being afraid of heights, I had a slight issue with being up so high. But other than that it was pretty rad!
Like I mentioned before, we didn’t go to the film or museum about the L&C Expedition because we live at the end of it, so we have learned about it quite a lot in school growing up. But now Toto and I can say we have been to the beginning AND the end of the L&C Expedition, and well I think I-84 follows a bit of it too so we have even retraced some of their footsteps. Although we had power windows, air conditioning and cruise control.
We had dinner at a little place a few blocks from the arch park, nothing too exciting.
Toto and I (being slightly artistically inclined) walked around the water front area near the park and took a ton of pictures. When Toto and I got out of the car and went up to the park, we were trying to take some pictures. She took a few of me on the waterfront with the arch in the background, then I tried to take a few of her. In my attempt I failed. I changed the camera from auto to manual light settings, then I changed it to landscape setting, then I changed it to manual focus, all the things that usually fix the problem wouldn’t. So I yell at Toto, “You’re stinking camera won’t let me take the effing picture!” I glance down at the screen on the top of the camera too look at the shutter speed and the aperture settings and I see a flashing word, “FULL”. She hadn’t emptied the memory disk (which is a four gig card). So we had to go back down to the car in the garage and get the computer out of the back (which I had buried for safe keeping so that no one would break into the car) and then the computer turned on then died again because it was out of battery power, all in all it took us 20 minutes but we got a bunch of pictures deleted and transferred to where they needed to be and most importantly, got space on the camera memory disk. Which is good because I think we took 300 or 350 pictures that day. We did goofy stuff like dipping our toes in the Mississippi River just so we could say we did, and I was a little dumbfounded that I (a little girl from Gresham, OR) was standing in St. Louis where one of (if not THE) greatest adventures of all time started. And my home is basically where it ended (ok, Astoria is where it ended but I have been there a bunch of times). And the Mississippi River is something you read about in Huckleberry Finn and classic novels like that, to be standing near it, to stick my toes in it was a whole different kind of experience for me.
We left via I-64 over the Mississippi River into Illinois and drove across the bottom part into Indiana and then down into Louisville. Something interesting happened to me while I was driving in Illinois. I saw something (well a lot of somethings) that made me worry for a second that there was either a pack of coyotes hiding in the bushes along the freeway (and I mean like 500 coyotes) or I was going crazy, then I realized, LIGHTENING BUGS!! We confirmed this fact with a friend in the area, and I spent the next four hours of drive time entertaining myself with the little flashes of light on the side of the road. They are beautiful. I call them “Nature’s Glitter”. I am sad that we do not have them in Oregon. I would LOVE to see them all the time. It was funny when one would find its demise on the windshield (this happened three or four times). When they hit the glass, they keep glowing. I wanted to time how long it took for them to stop glowing, but Toto didn’t want me messing with my watch and trying to drive through unknown sections of the country in the dark.
Somewhere just north of the state line between Indiana and Kentucky the time zone goes from Central to Eastern, so we went from 12:15am to 1:15am instantly. By the time we got to the hotel it was nearly two in the morning. By the time we got checked in and unloaded and into bed and had done all the required facebooking, it was nearly four in the morning. We were wiped out, but with nothing solidly planned before six pm the next day, we were ok with the idea of sleeping in the next morning.
License Plates Seen
Massachusetts
Ioea
Playlist
Sara Barelles
Plain White T's
Richard Marx
Queen
Michael Buble
The arch sounds very cool, I hope to get there someday to see it as well! Sounds like you are both having a fun trip and making lots of memories together!!
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