The Road Home: Part Three

The entire trip from Utah to Virginia took over three days. When I drove out to Utah, it took about two and a half days. That was in my Honda Civic with little to no sleep. This time around, I was in a Penske truck with my car being lugged behind. It wasn’t quite as easy and definitely took longer. After passing through Kansas City, it all really started to blur together. City after city, state after state. I still found it in me to take pictures :) That’s what bloggers do!

We saw the city ahead, but were unsure at first which Kansas City it was! I had been to Missouri once before while driving from Virginia, but had never seen Kansas City, Kansas before and didn’t know what to think. I saw this little sign above while driving into the city. That clarified everything :) The city had lots of old buildings like the one below that were full of character and years of history. How can you NOT love that about a city?

Missouri has always reminded me a bit of Virginia -- cities and suburbs here and there. We definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore!

As the sun started to set, and after driving through most of the state, we began approaching the St. Louis area. As expected, Nelly songs were playing in my head. I mean, that’s only natural, right??

It had been a LONG day of driving. Surprisingly, we didn’t have much of an appetite by the time we stopped for the night. We found a Hampton Inn {as preferred} and settled in. Stella had become accustomed to hotels at this point and was loving her life. And, yes, she does have three collars on at this point. Not standard. She likes accessories, okay? :)

The next day, we enjoyed a yummy complimentary breakfast while watching the latest weather reports on Hurricane Irene. We had not traveled as far as we had hoped the previous day, since the traffic from the accident and the time zone change added two hours to our trip. It was going to be hard to make it home to the DC area that night, but it was worth a shot.

Driving past the St. Louis arch is a pretty cool thing. On my way out to Utah, I stopped at the arch to see it up-close but due to our time crunch, driving past it this time would suffice! It’s still a great and mighty thing to look at. The arch is known as The Gateway Arch, built as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States!

 

That was it for Missouri! There were still three more states {not including all of Virginia} to cover before we’d be home. The fourth and final post about The Road Home is still to come :)

Has anyone made the journey to the top of the St. Louis arch before?