Drive South

I'm starting this blog in our Comfort Suites hotel room in St. Charles, MO. We left home about mid-afternoon on Thursday for our new home in Millington, TN, where I'll be working with the Army Corps of Engineers Logistics Activity. We spent our first night at the home of Barb's daughter and her family in Omaha, and then got going about 9:40 a.m. Friday on the real "new adventure" part of this trip, turning south on Interstate 29 onto countryside we haven't seen before.
My first impressions of Missouri, which we passed into sometime around 10:30, was that it was rather unremarkable, except for numerous dead deer lying along the road side, and a dusting of snow in the north-facing ditches north of St. Joseph. But it was a beautiful day to travel -- sunny and warm for being November 11 -- or as the peculiar date stamp would read -- 11-11-11. Barb turned on the radio and we had country music for much of the day -- a harbinger of things to come as we head to Tennessee -- the home of country music.
Our day ended about 5 p.m. when we reached our hotel here in St. Charles. On the hotel staff's recommendation, we visited "Pio's" down the street for a great ribeye steak and a cold beer (my choices). It was a welcome end to a long day -- about 400 miles traveled. Tomorrow, when we're packed and ready to go again, it's on to Millington -- about 5 hours south of here. It will be a funny feeling to think of this as our new home. It's been so long since I've moved that far. More to come....
Saturday: We're both pooped out after finally arriving in Millington about 2:30 p.m. today. The trip meter read 910 miles.
Today's highlights: We stopped in Cape Girardeau, MO for gasoline, and noticed a White Castle restaurant across the street. My only experience with White Castle was a young boy when my dad took me to the Twin Cities on a Farmers Union bus tour for a Twins game. So Barb and I stopped for a few tasty "sliders."
The next thing of note were fields of white that began to pop up in southern Missouri. I realized they were cotton fields -- something I'd never seen before. Some fields had round bales of cotton, similar to the hay bales we see in fields in South Dakota. Others had what appeared to be covered cotton "stacks." I'm sure this is just the beginning of a "re-education" we'll go through in adjusting to our new home down south.
One trivia note: We crossed the Missouri River three times on our trip down here, but only crossed the Mississippi once -- that being when we crossed into Tennessee about 1 p.m. today. We looked around Millington some after our arrival today. We'll be doing a lot of that over the next few days. More about that later.