Day 1 - Chicago to St. Louis
We took off on our little adventure on a Wednesday evening. The original plan was to drive to Springfield and spend the night there. We had a hotel room reserved in Tulsa for Thursday night, so our goal was to cut down how long we had to drive on Thursday. We got to Springfield in a little over three hours & I was feeling pretty spry, so we pressed on and ended up spending the night a little west of St. Louis on I-44. We were in a Holiday Inn Express across the highway from a shuttered Chrysler plant. The phone in the hotel room had a dedicated button to call the factory, which was a little depressing when you thought about all of the people who used to work there.
Around midnight, I asked Jonnell "did you bring the Rangers Tickets?" (since I forgot), "Oh crap" was her reply. I came up with a solution after half an hour but neither of us slept very well.
Day 2 - St. Louis to Tulsa, OKAs was the norm for the trip, we didn't roll out of bed until 9 or so. We then had to rush a little to get downstairs before their free breakfast ended. At least Jonnell did, I had my eye on breakfast from the Sonic down the street from the hotel. I wanted to try a Texas Toaster sandwich. It was pretty good.
Thursday morning was the last time we felt temperatures below 80 degrees for the duration of the vacation.
Around noon, I gave the Rangers ticket office a call and explained that we didn't have our tickets. The people I spoke with were very nice and had the tickets reprinted and held at will call for us.
As we reached the western edge of Missouri, we started seeing billboards for the Precious Moments chapel. Jonnell was already somewhat aware of the place because five years earlier I ended up staying at the Precious Moments hotel (by accident, really) when I was driving my EBay purchased car home from Fort Worth. So, I was prodded to drive to Carthage and check it out. It was both creepy and interesting.
There were lots of these mostly naked child angel statues around the grounds.
This is pretty creepy.
There were also a surprising number of Native American children in the stained glass windows and figurines.
We probably spent an hour there wandering about, Jonnell got a kick out of it & bought some souvenirs.
A few hours later we ended up in Tulsa. We again were in a Holiday Inn Express, a bunch of middle age bikers were staying in the hotel as well. We ate dinner at the Elote Cafe, which is a little Mexican place in downtown Tulsa. It was great, if you are in Tulsa you should check it out. I also had a few beers from Marshall Brewing in Tulsa which were good.
Tomorrow - Arlington, TX & Austin
