Are We There Yet??? Our Trip to Missouri

Call us crazy with gas prices as high as they are, but we drove 3,100 miles round trip to visit Grandma in Missouri! We left June 28th and drove from Utah through Colorado, with it's beautiful vistas, mountains, and the Colorado River. . .

"Rocky Mountain High"

. . . and drove through Kansas, with it's "Amber Waves of Grain" and acres and acres of corn and beans. It was interesting to see the farms; each one had about 3 rows of evergreen trees planted all around the house and barns for a windbreak and everywhere else was just flat--no trees, nothing. There were a lot of bigger farms that had their own huge grain mills. We saw a ton of windmills too--they were like tremendous sentries guarding the plains. What was really bizarre were the huge churches out in the middle of nowhere!

. . . and drove halfway through Missouri to Jefferson City, the capital. The landscape there is rolling hills and trees everywhere! We crossed the Missouri River, which runs through Jefferson City--it blows doors on our rivers out West!

The capital building and Lewis & Clark memorial.


After a few days at Grandma's we drove to St. Louis to fly to Alaska. The Mississippi (also HUGE) was very swollen from the flooding. It was churning and flowing faster than it was the last time I was there in 1988. The streets closest to the river were flooded almost up to the top of the street signs. Grandma and Grandpa took the girls to the Arch and the City Museum (a very cool children's museum http://www.citymuseum.org/allattractions.html), and Mike and I went to the airport to fly to Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Arch

Inside the top of the Arch--630 feet!

The Mississippi from inside the Arch

City Museum Castle

Climbing around in MonstroCity--the huge jungle gym made out of two Saber 40 aircraft fuselages, a fire engine, a castle turret, a 25' tall cupola and several 4' wide wrought-iron slinkies.

Danika, Megan and Brooke on the banks of the Mississippi. You can see some of the flooding.

While we were in Alaska, the girls stayed with Grandma & Grandpa. They are busy trying to finish their new home, but they drove the girls down to Branson for a couple of days. They stayed at the "Boxcar Willie" hotel. The kids had never heard of him, so were extremely puzzled how he could be "the world's favorite hobo." That's stretching it, if you ask me...but who am I in the hobo world? They had fun swimming and visiting Silver Dollar City, which is an amusement park with a western theme. It's an interesting phenomenon--because Missouri was the "gateway to the West," Missourians seem to think their neck of the woods is "The West." Coming from the true West, I find that ludicrous. The girls' favorite things were the shows and the swing ride.

4th of July--Dippin' Dots Ice Cream and camel rides in downtown Jeff City.

Whew! this is a whopper of a post, so I'll do the Alaska trip later! We are glad to be home!