Second Day: through St. Louis to Kingdom City, MO

Monday, July 9, 2007, 12:10 am:
I am writing briefly on the night of the second day. I cannot sleep just yet, even though I am tired and stopped reading because I could not keep my eyes open. I am up not because of Jason’s snoring, which may yet be a problem this evening—we’ll see—but because I ate too much dinner and my stomach is still digesting.
We are stopped tonight at the Comfort Inn in Kingdom City, MO. I love this town name. It is right on I-70, the main road between St. Louis and KC, MO. We had a real good day of driving, with no real traffic problems and making good time the whole way. We left Kingsport, TN at around 9:40 am. We made a quick Sonic stop on the way out of town for chocolate cherry coke for Jason. Sonic is like one of those places in American Graffiti where you drive up to a parking space and a nice girl comes up and takes your order, and then brings it out to you and puts a tray on your car door, although we did the drive through equivalent of this. The only difference between the Sonic in Kingsport and the one in American Graffiti is that the girl is not wearing roller skates and instead has an impressive Tennessee twang.

We hit the road with Jason driving first and took I-81 to I-40 to Nashville, which has a lovely skyline from the Interstate. The football stadium is quite visible as are the highrises. Then we got on I-24 to I-57 to I-64 to St. Louis. Along the way, we stopped for gas and Jason switched to JK and we had a nice light lunch that Jason’s mom had packed of ham sandwiches and chips that we were able to eat without stopping. We had also had bacon and egg biscuits for breakfast, which means three really good meals in a row from Jason’s mom—Thanks! We stopped one other time along the way and Jason brought it home to St. Louis around 5 pm central time. One time zone down, two more to go.

We went to the arch and got in a few decent pictures. We were given a name of a bbq joint in St. Louis from Konlee, but they were closed on Sunday. While looking at the map trying to figure in which direction to head for viable dinner spots, a nice fellow came down the deserted downtown street we were on and offered helpful directions to a Bandana’s bbg restaurant, which appears to be a regional chain. Eventually we made it there for some decent bbq, even if the service took a while to get started. I wouldn’t say that it was as good as Red, Hot and Blue, but the meats and a couple of the sauces were pretty good. The St. Louis style ribs they offered were tender, but not particularly flavorful. One of the side dishes were the “famous” fried corn on the cobs, which Jason and I decided could only be famous (really infamous by our definition) by taking perfectly good corn cobs and making them more greasy and less tasty. After dinner, we decided from our position on the western outskirts of St. Louis to drive for another hour to make for an easy approach to and more time for Kansas City. Thus we have ended up in Kingdom City.

Along the way we decided to track state license plates. We recollected a handful we had seen yesterday, and started keeping track first thing today. I think we are already up to 37 states, with the shortages being New England, the Upper Plains and Rockies, Nevada, Alaska and Hawaii. We saw an Alaska plate while on foot at the arch, but Jason decided to be pure about it, so we’re only going to count plates seen while in the car. Also, semis and U-haul types don’t count. Try not to think about the fact that if you have ever played this game in your life, it was because your parents suggested it as a way for you and your siblings to keep from killing each other in the backseat. I am a little nervous of what our voluntarily playing this game on day 2 represents for our odds of not killing each other over 28 days.

Well, my digestion has proceeded nicely this evening, and I am going to make my first attempt of the trip to sleep in the same room as Jason. I am very cautiously optimistic.

Ok, time for bed. Goodnight…