Driving in Missouri

Yesterday we packed and ate lunch at Neely’s Barbecue…it was good but Rendezvous Barbecue was way better.  We hit the road for Saint Louis at around 1:00.

We only had a 4 hour drive but we arrived at our campground in Washington State Park feeling terribly exhausted.  We thought about it and realized that we’ve been in/through 10 states in only 12 days and that we’ve been moving at a break-neck pace.  This has mostly been due to the fact that we’ve been so excited to see new places but ever since our drive from Austin to Memphis we’ve been beat. 

Over dinner at a lousy “pizza” place in downtown De Soto, Missouri, (population 6,400) we settled on a game plan to get us back in action.  We were out of clean clothes and needed a day just to rest and go at a slow pace, so today we’ve just stuck around the campground doing laundry, walking some easy trails, shaving my head, and playing in a river where we found a water moccasin.    

The temperature has been fantastic since we’ve been here…we left Memphis and it was holding at around 97 degrees, but up here in the Ozark “Mountains” (they’re just big hills where we are), the temperature dropped by 20 degrees. 

See the mountain?  Me neither, but I'm told that I was standing on one.

God has really answered prayers by keeping all the big storms in the area away from where we are camping.  It wouldn’t have been too fun to spend the night in the car because of high winds or lightening.

So the park ranger at the place we are staying is a very unyielding person.  The camp host warned us that he was handing out tickets the other day to drivers who were going 15 miles per hour instead of the posted 10 mph speed limit.  All he does all day is drive around his little kingdom in his park ranger car and see if anyone has stepped out of line.

Our game plan is to head to Saint Louis tomorrow.  We are about an hour southeast of the city so we’ll get up early and head there straight away.  We plan to spend the day playing around the city, then we’ll either head out of town and find a motel/campsite to stay in between Saint Louis and Chicago, or, if we still want to stick around for a bit, just find a place within the city to stay so we can get in some more time the next day. 


A couple of fun facts about Missouri: no matter how fast you are speeding, locals will always tail you; the state must have saved a fortune in road paint because most of the small roads we have driven have no lines, just big grooves cut in the middle to warn you when you've crossed to the wrong side; many highways have names like "CC" or "DD" or "NN" instead of names like "William Wallace Avenue" or "Highway 63"; there are petroglyphs in this state park...I think they are just carvings in stone that Native Americans left, but we haven't been by to check them out...I'm prepared to be less than impressed; finally, there are several animals here that we have in South Carolina, like the gray tree frogs I caught, or these fence lizards that my kids at school caught...but then there are also guys like this that are neat too: