…..Wednesday morning I was up early and we left Columbus, OH
at 7 a.m. We drove 5 hours to Lewisport, KY, where we tromped around a cemetery
for a while looking for Amy’s relations. It was kind of fun. I like cemeteries.
Call me morbid but I like to look at the grave stones and imagine the people
who they remember and try to piece together a piece of their lives from what
the head stone says.
From there we stopped by some other relation’s homes but
no one was home. Finally Amy’s Dad’s best friends found us and we heard several
stories about Amy’s father. Then we met up with Aunt Betty. She was adorable. I
wanted to scoop her up and take her with us. After a 2.5 hour visit in
Lewisport we once again hit the road heading to St. Louis. We had plans of
seeing the Arch and since it closed at 6 p.m. we wanted to land in St. Louis at
5 p.m. so we could go up in the Arch and see the view. We pushed through needed
bladder breaks, food breaks, fuel stops and drove 3.5 hours straight to St.
Louis so we’d have an hour to find the arch, purchase tickets and see the view
from the top. We parked, paid for parking and then followed the signs to the
“old courthouse” to purchase tickets. After following the arch signs for about
15 minutes we arrive at the old courthouse where it says on a 100 foot banner,
“purchase Arch tickets here” only to find the doors locked and no one is home.
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| This is the Old Courthouse. If you look closely in the middle it clearly says to buy the arch tickets there. |
So we headed to the Arch only to find that the tickets were sold out for the
day, the video in the theatre was ending and wouldn’t start again for the rest
of the day and the museum was closed. But of course the gift shop was open. But
after not seeing anything at the arch I didn’t much feel like purchasing
anything.
It was rather disappointing that after pushing so hard to
make it to the arch on time we didn’t get to see anything other than the Arch
from the outside. Dejected and disheartened we stopped at Starbucks for a drink
and a mug to mile mark the disappointment in our journey we headed back to the
car. At this point we were 10 miles from empty and looked for a gas station.
After using up 6 miles worth of fuel to get to a place the GPS said was a
station which in actuality was not. We got on the highway franticly looking for
a place to refuel and with three miles left we got off on an exit which looked
like it would be a petrol friendly area. We actually ended up driving through
an eerie abandoned part of town that didn’t even boast residence let alone a
working filling station. We again tried the GPS, a different app this time, and
1 mile later with two miles left came upon a ghetto part of town with a gas
pump. Amy and I were so relieved to not have run out of gas and were so excited
to see people again that we didn’t even care that it was a less than
respectable part of town.
At this point we were ready to leave St. Louis in the
rearview mirror and put some rubber between us and two good stories that will
be funnier in the future.
After dinner somewhere in Missouri we pushed through to
Kansas City, MO pulling into a Drury in across from the Kansas City Royals
stadium. It was really late and I was pretty exhausted. The only room they had
left was the handicap room which wasn’t what I was expecting but hey, it had a
king size bed to share and a bathroom so I didn’t much care. I was very ready to put this day in the
books.
