On the road: TN to MO

In 1804, my great-great(-great-great-great-great... etc) uncle Meriwether Lewis passed through St. Louis, MO with his good friend William Clark at the beginning of what became the renowned Lewis and Clark Expedition. While their goal was to explore and map out America's newly acquired western territory, Peter and I were hoping to just make it through the Gateway to the West without getting lost.

The drive took over 5 hours, most of which was through the rolling hills of rural Kentucky and Illinois. We listened to audiobooks and music, talked, and I tried to get some sleep when I wasn't driving.

Geese migrating over rural Illinois

At one point about halfway through the drive, Peter poked me awake and I felt the car rumbling over bumpy terrain as I struggled to pull myself out of my slumber. "Look! Look!" He urged as the car rolled to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.

Lo and behold, outside the passenger window there was a massive, dark, amorphous cloud flowing and ebbing across a brown field. Migrating geese!!! I had always heard about these epic mass migrations, but to see it in real life was phenomenal.

Unfortunately my camera was somewhere buried in the back under the rest of our gear, but I managed to capture a short video on my phone.

I was excited that we made it to St. Louis, MO by mid-afternoon while the sun was still shining, so we decided to try and go visit the iconic Gateway Arch before heading to our couch surfing home. Unfortunately, it turned out there was a ton of construction surrounding the arch, and we ended up driving in circles and back and forth across the river for nearly an hour just trying to find somewhere to get to it.

 

Finally, we admitted defeat, and I decided just to be happy with the photos I got from the road. 

Our couch surfing host was an older-middle-aged man who lived right near downtown in a big multistory flat. He had two big friendly dogs, and he showed us some of the work he does for a living, painting and refurbishing interior wood.


We enjoyed some nice conversation with him, cooked a big dinner in his kitchen to share, and then afterwards we joined him and some of his friends down the road for an open mic night at a local tavern. The open mic night was fairly bad, but entertaining, and afterwards we left early to get back and get some sleep before a long drive into Kansas the next day.

It would have been nice to spend more time in St. Louis, but the wild west was calling us, and we were both getting pretty anxious to hit the road again. We knew the next few days were about to challenge our driving endurance.