cross country part one
First off, packing a truck takes a lot longer than I expected. we rented a 16ft penske truck and a double axel car trailer for the move. I expected to fill maybe half the truck, in the end, some stuff needed to be left behind for lack of room! Andrea and I packed half the truck on sunday the 23, then my buddy Scott gave us a hand on monday the 24th. we didn't get finished until after dark, decided to wait for Andrea to get home from work before we left, as we wanted to see each other one more time before being apart fro 2 weeks :). she treated us to a fine dinner at bennigans (which I would be hearing about cravings for a monte christo sandwich from scott for the majority of the trip) then said our goodbyes and hit the road.
Flying J would become our friend.
car and truck at gas stop in ohio.
drove almost exactly 300 miles monday night to ohio, and glad we got the turnpike and all that mess out of the way before what seemed like the true first day of the trip.
wide awake and ready to drive!
Scott hiding behind his camera.
tuesday we checked out of the hotel and hit the road, covering ohio, illinois and indiana. as we found out, theres not much to see before you cross the mississippi river. we covered about 600 miles the second day and stayed just outside of st.louis.
we worked on a relaxed schedule of sleeping in late and checking out as late as we could. parking the big ass truck and trailer became a chore, and I got quite good at backing it up :) we usually had to park the thing "out back" of everywhere, the second night I didn't get much sleep, as I kept dreaming that I would wake up to find the truck gone, basically everything we own stolen, and stuck in middle america, but exhaustion quickly convinced me to just relax as stress wasn't something I needed as a partner on this trip.
hit the road again, passed through st.louis (which looked like a fine city btw) then on across missouri to kansas.
I wonder what their slogan is?
st. louis
kansas city
outside of kansas city we decided that our cheap fm transmitter for the ipod / laptop / random music source was too weak to compete with the mighty powers of the GM radio antenna, so I evened out the playing field by removing it.
kansas is a pretty big state, although not as flat as one would believe.
we actually took 2,583 photos during the trip, so part two (colorado& rocky mountains), and part 3 (utah, idaho and oregon) will come as I sort through and resize them.