June 11 - United States: St Louis, Missouri

We hung out with Bridget for a while this morning before we left for St Louis.  And before leaving Kansas City, we had to stop by Wal-Mart to pick up a few things.  This is becoming a joke, actually.  It would seem that we have some compulsion to visit the Wal-Mart in every place we drive through.  It's pretty funny by this point.

The drive to St Louis was unexciting, except for the ominous-looking clouds over the city.  The radio was talking about flash flood warnings, and traffic was really heavy.  So I called up my Grandmother to let her know we were going to be late for dinner.

St Louis

Both of my parents were born and raised in St Louis, and this is where my grandparents and most of my relatives live.  I was actually born here, but that's because Mom came back here for a while when Dad was in Vietnam.  Other than that, I've only been to St Louis a handful of times for reunions, anniversaries, or family vacations.  Jon and I decided that this drive across country would be the perfect opportunity to stop by and see the family again.

The roads were terrible.  And although the storm was moving away from us, the traffic was incredibly heavy.  I have to attribute part of that to the fact that the infrastructure in this town is atrociously old.  The highways are patched concrete and most of the freeways are only four lanes wide.  There appears to be some construction going on, but they have a lot of work to do if they want to advance this road system into the 21st century.  Actually, they have a lot of work if they want to advance it beyond the 1960s.

We made it to Grandma and Grandpa's about an hour later than we'd planned, but we were happy to be there.  I haven't seen my grandparents since our wedding three and a half years ago, so it was a nice reunion for us.  We got settled into our room and Grandma served dinner, which was a casserole she'd made.  Their power was out because of the storms, so we ate by candlelight until the power came back on again.

Later in the evening, we showed them the China slide show that Mel and Ken had given us.  They really enjoyed it and we enjoyed seeing it again.  We want to put one of these slide shows together for our year-on-the-road, but we just need the time to do it.

We all went to bed around 10:30 or so, and fell asleep to some really powerful thunderstorms.