Missour-ee or Missour-uh?

Day Four, Monday, August 22, 2011

We woke up to another lovely day and, as we promised ourselves the night before, we managed to get down to the lobby to eat some breakfast. The food was mediocre but filling, and after fueling up both ourselves and our vehicle we were off around 10:30 in the morning. It took a whole five minutes to get to Missouri from our hotel, and our first stop was the Saint Louis Arch, which, interestingly enough, you can see pretty well from Illinois.

After standing in awe of the arch for a few minutes, we headed to a neighborhood of Saint Louis known as "The Loop". It was a pretty cool area, featuring a comic shop, a great indie book store, a record shop, and a lot of great food. We spent a little over an hour touring around and looking at everything. Of particular note was the "Planet Walk," which was a to-scale model of the solar system. We managed to find everything up to Uranus, but we didn't really want to walk to Neptune's plaque.

Angry Birds Shooting Gallery

Chuck Berry was a giant

Dana in her Heaven

Planet Walk

Before leaving The Loop, we headed to a sandwich shop called Snarf's to get some food for the road, and then headed to our final Saint Louis stop: a sculpture park. It was full of some great and creative stuff, all strewn out in a beautiful little park area.

Giant Eyeball

Pickin' that nose

After all that, we finally parted from Saint Louis, heading southwest toward Tulsa. This was the longest continuous part of the trek, so it was nice to get it out of the way early. Our next stop was in Marshfield, Missouri. In 1889, this town produced a man named Edwin Hubble, who would grow up to prove the existence of other galaxies in the universe, and for whom the Space Telescope is named. To honor their native son, Marshfield has a model of the Hubble Telescope sitting in front of a building. It's pretty cool to see!

We continued to the southwest, racing toward the Missouri-Oklahoma border. It was already late afternoon and we had a couple stops left to go. Our next stop was the American Legion in Springfield, which had a particularly interesting sight. Where Moorestown, NJ has a ship jutting from the ground, the American Legion features the sail of a submarine jutting from the ground. The sub is SSN-661, the USS Lapin, which was decommissioned in 1992.

After Springfield, we headed down I-44 toward Oklahoma, only to take Exit 1 and head up in the direction of Kansas. We had a single stop in Kansas, mostly just for the novelty of adding another state to our trip, but also because the stop was fairly interesting in its own right.

The Rainbow Bridge is the last of the Marsh Arch Bridges on Route 66. There were hundreds of these single-span bridges built in the early twentieth century, but the vast majority were torn down. Only a few remain, most preserved due to being registered as historically important. By the way, we had been driving on Route 66 the majority of the day - well, what used to be Route 66. In most of Missouri, the historical highway had been redesignated and repaved as I-44.

Anyway, we canceled last stop due to the fact that the sun was going down - it was a gigantic cartoon blue whale that you could walk through. Oh well, bed feels just as good. Dana and I hit up Waffle House for dinner and planned on relaxing the rest of the evening. Another great day!

States: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Missouri (again, briefly), Oklahoma

Cities: Saint Louis

Next stop, Amarillo!

PS: Oh, and tomorrow!

• No shortage of gas stations
• The next best thing to Cadillacs is obviously VW Bugs
• STEAKZ
• Some girl named Lauren guest stars