Tuesday dawned bright and clear, but don’t ask me how we got from the hotel onto Interstate 70 headed east toward St. Louis, because I let Chris do the navigating.
In her career with the National Weather Service, Chris has had multiple occasions to spend time in the Kansas City area, and she has many times covered the ground we were to cover today and the next day. Our route out of KC required us to get on Interstate 35 south, then I-435 to cross the Missouri River for the third time on our trip, and then find I-70 eastbound. We managed it even amidst the morning traffic.
Now that we were in the American heartland we were seeing trees in density we hadn’t seen since approaching Edmonton. The I-70 corridor also proved to be populated more densely than any extended stretch we had encountered yet on our drive. We crossed the Missouri for the fourth time outside Columbia, in the midst of a construction backup, and encountered another backup near a town called High Hill. I saw a sign reading, “Welcome to High Hill — the Little Town with a Big Heart.” I read the sign over the radio to Chris, adding, “It also happens to have clogged arteries.”
Once we made it past the MoDOT-created cholesterol, we began to approach the dreaded St. Louis metro area. Even though this self-proclaimed “Gateway to the West” is smaller than its counterpart to the west, it met all my worst expectations as a traffic nightmare. Maybe Kansas City is just better planned, but it didn’t set my teeth on edge the way St. Louis did.
I took the lead again after a gas stop in St. Charles, and we crossed the Missouri for the fifth and last time before reaching the freeway that loops around St. Louis to the north and south. We were much closer to the Mississippi River if we took the north, so I took the ramp that pointed us toward — of all places — Chicago. Yet once we finally made it across Big Muddy and into the Illinois countryside, we found that the traffic was much more tolerable. We had to navigate a couple more interchanges but we managed it with repeated sighs of relief as we remembered what we’d gone through just getting to the river.
At one point a construction zone caused an abrupt narrowing of the highway, and the lane I was in was being forced to merge into the next one to the left. Chris had already merged, and upon seeing that I was having trouble merging she told me via radio to run ahead and get in front of her. I didn’t argue.
With this crossing I added another state to my travel “life list,” which now includes 27 states (although I got two just from airport layovers), two Canadian provinces and the Yukon Territory.
The countryside here looked as I would have imagined downstate Illinois looking: flat farmland. At Mount Vernon we left I-64 and took I-55 south. After another forty-some miles we reached Marion, the twelfth overnight stop on our long journey from the Great White North into the heart of the South. And the closest we had come yet to being in the South was Missouri, which had contributed men to the Confederate army in the Civil War. We weren’t very far from where my great great grandfather — a Union army veteran — lived much of his postwar life.
We checked into our hotel, rested up a while, then drove to Ryan’s (another buffet restaurant) for dinner. Chris was very excited about the next day’s drive — we would be headed for Chattanooga. Home.
