Tour Diaries: Getting There, part 3

Sunday, after getting the desk clerk to reset the wireless router so we could login, we caught up on our blogs and email and got a good night’s sleep.  Monday found us driving into the sunrise on I-80 from Ogallala, Nebraska, crossing the time zone almost immediately, making us an hour late to begin with.  Starbucks at North Platte, 55 miles down the road.  We’d stopped there in September on our way to California.  Temp below freezing, but roads dry.

At Lincoln, we turned south again, crossing over into Missouri at Rock Port, where the levee failed in June, flooding the industrial area along the highway.  The highway was still under reconstruction and the bridge under repair.  We waited two cycles through the light to cross the Missouri on the one-way bridge.  The road was being reconstructed, with pools of floodwater still present and the silt lines on the buildings and power poles a couple feet above the roadway.  All bets are off in the 500-year flood plain when you build levees, and you never know when the 500 years are up…

Stopped for late lunch/early supper in St. Joseph, then joined the rush-hour traffic in Kansas City, MO, before headed east on I-70.  We picked up maps of the Katy Trail State Park, a future bike tour.  We cross the Missouri again at Booneville, passing over the Katy into darkness.

The Super 8 web site didn’t list a motel for Columbia, so we had opted for $CHEAP_HOTEL on Priceline.com during our lunch stop.  We rejected the first room offered, a stinky, dirty smoking room in the back of the motel, with shadowy figures lurking in the alley, and crowbar marks on the door near the night latch.  The second room was in the front, well-lighted and non-smoking, but cramped, with two full-sized beds crammed against the walls.  No wireless, but wired, with a live Ethernet jack on the wall.  Fast.  Downside, no place to put the computer.  We ended up standing in front of the refrigerator with the computer on top of the microwave and the mouse on a clipboard jammed under the computer.

On Tuesday morning, we holed up at Starbucks a few miles down the road until it started to get light, then drove into the rising sun toward St. Louis and the morning rush hour, crossing the Missouri one more time, then the Mississippi, looking over our shoulders at the Arch.  South at Mt. Vernon, Illinois, then southeast over the Ohio River to Paducah, where we had lunch at Jasmine, a nice Thai restaurant at which we had eaten last year.  We elected to skip the quilt museum this trip and pressed on through Nashville to Manchester, TN, where the GPS alternate universe kicked in once again.  We had made a reservation online at the Super 8, but when we got there, it was under renovation and closed.  A call to the reservation toll-free redirected us a few exits back, where the Hampton Inn exists in the alternate universe, but in ours sported a new Super 8 banner hidden behind a tree.  We checked in, but the Internet wireless access in our end of the motel was broken, so the Unix Curmudgeon was forced to ply his trade in the lobby, where other ‘Net denizens had collected earlier.

The fall colors through the midwest hardwood forests are awesome, and the warm weather is a welcome contrast to the frosty mornings experienced so far.  After four days of  before-dawn to after-dark driving, we are planning to have a leisurely start on Wednesday, a short drive over to Tullahoma to check out the Beechcraft Heritage Museum, which we missed on our trip to nearby Shelbyville last year.