Day 2 — Kentucky to Kansas City

Whew! Day 2 was a long day! I had hoped that we would leave my brother's at a decent time, but we didn't. Instead I let the kids stay up late and play, so we all slept until 9. And then the laundry took a long time to be done. By the time we left it was almost lunch time, which made a long, long drive to Kansas City.

My first pictures are from the night before. When I got into bed there was a thunderstorm going--and of course that made me happy. I opened the curtains so that I could watch and was quite entertained. After a few minutes the biggest lightning bolt flashed that I have ever seen--probably at least 5x as wide as a regular one, and it seemed to be as tall as the sky. The thunder rumbled the whole house.

I had a brilliant idea. Since the storm was obviously not passing quickly, I thought I would try to see if I could take a picture of the lightning. At our house most of the lightning is obscured by the trees, but my brother has a great wide open view from the back of his house. I stood in the back door and turned the camera to continuous shooting, and started taking pictures. I had to mess with the settings a lot, and I finally ended up shooting at 1/10th to 1/6th of a second. Any shorter and nothing showed up at all, any longer and any lightning just washed out the picture. These pictures aren't as dramatic as I'd like, but I'm still quite excited that I "caught" lightning in about 5 pictures. (Out of 583 pictures!)


And now back to our drive. The first big city we came to was Louisville. Now I know nothing at all about Louisville except that it's bound on two sides by the Ohio River, and it has amazing bridges. Each bridge is designed differently, and each one is beautiful. One of my favorite things about the bridges is that when you get up close to them so many of them look like they're made out of enormous erector sets!

I just counted on Google using the satellite view and I think there are 5 bridges. I had planned that Jason could take some pictures for me, but he and his cute cousin Kate had stayed up playing games until 1:30 AM, so he was completely zonked.

So I held the camera and hoped that I was pointing in the generally correct direction. I think my pictures turned out really well.

(I needed to crop the pictures a lot & rotate them a little, and I did it on picnik.com. I can't recommend this site highly enough. It is awesome & free too! I've never seen anything like their rotate function!)





This last bridge is the one that we actually drove over. Because of the angle & all of the trees I couldn't get a good picture of it, so I found this one online. It's quite dramatic.

We crossed into Indiana for the next part of our trip. I was interested to see that Indiana held the answer to one of life's most enduring questions.

It also looks like they have a place made specifically for me in Indiana.

In Indiana we saw more rocks blasted away to make the interstate. For some reason it is fascinating to me to see these places--to see all of the different rocks that are exposed this way.In the afternoon we got to St. Louis, which is another of our favorite places to drive though. When I was a teenager we lived in a small town in Iowa on the Mississippi River. We actually went to church in a building in Illinois, and so we crossed the Mississippi River 2-4 times per week, sometimes more. We always loved it, and I love it still.

St. Louis is also great, though, because of the arch. The interstate comes up to the arch and then makes a sharp turn taking you past it. This configuration means that you see it from a lot of different angles. Jason took all of these pictures from the moving van--they turned out great.

I loved driving across Indiana (I slept through Illinois) and Missouri. The rolling hills are so beautiful, and as much as I love my NC trees, it's nice to see so much sky. One lovely sight we saw was after we crossed the Missouri River. There was some water on the far side--possibly flood plain--and there were tons of herons standing in the water.

As we reached Kansas City and passed the signs for Liberty and Independence, I was amazed again at how much the pioneers traveled even before they started their long journey to Utah. It was only last year that I realized that when they lived in Missouri it was on the western side (duh--"Far West"!!!), and that when they had to leave Missouri they went all the way back across the Mississippi. Crossing Missouri took me at least 4 hours in my van at 70mph. I can't even imagine how long it took them.

Kansas City was the end of Day 2. We were exhausted by the time we arrived, and I let the kids take a quick swim & then I popped them into bed & collapsed myself.

P.S. For breakfast my sister in law had recommended that we try a new cereal that she had— Kashi Digestive Care w/ probiotics, or something like that. I'm always interested in trying healthy food, so I had some. So did Jason. We weren't really excited about the prospects of eating a breakfast cereal that had dried broccoli in it, but it wasn't too bad. What was really bad was the effect on our digestive systems across the entire state of Missouri! Note to self: No more experimenting with anything involving excessive amounts of fiber while traveling!!