Some notes at the end of Day 2
It’s past midnight at my hotel in Columbia, Missouri, and I really should be sleeping. But I did want to share a few notes and observations. First, the numbers:
- Total miles driven: 1,423.1
- Day 1 miles: 717.5
- Day 2 miles: 705.5
- States I’ve driven and/or stopped in (new states for me in bold): Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri
- Social media pals I’ve met up with: 4
And …
- Saturday was New York Lottery Day (just thought you should know).
- Kentucky’s fair was taking place somwhere within radio listening distance of Louisville. No surprise here, I did not stop to have a look.
- I saw a couple of “Ohio Bicentennial, 1803-2003” signs painted onto borns.
- Ohio’s landscape was pretty, and much more rural than I was expecting. There were corn fields for much of my 200-mile drive into Cincinnati on Saturday morning.
- I passed by three baseball stadiums (two in Cincinnati and one in St. Louis) and two baseball stadiums (one in each city) on Saturday. I did get a snapshot of Busch Stadium.
- I made it 434.4 miles on a single tank on Day 2, going from Luke’s house to just across the Illinois border along I-64W. My fuel efficiency was just a touch under 29 miles/gallon for that stretch.
- I saw gas as cheap as $2.399 in St. Louis. On Friday afternoon just outside Buffalo, by contrast, I paid $4.139 per gallon.
- I was “heheing” to myself as I asked an attendant at an Indiana rest area what time it was. Read this “Time in Indiana” wikipedia entry, and you’ll see why.
- A section of Interstate 70 in St. Louis is called “Mark McGwire Highway.”
- I never knew that East St. Louis was actually in Illinois, on the east side of the Mississippi River. I wound up there on Saturday night for a few minutes after missing a turn for I-70W when leaving St. Louis. Let’s just say the area is in rough shape.
- I mentioned as part of my previous post how impressed I was with the Gateway Arch Riverfront in St. Louis, but it bears repeating here: It’s a setting you really should take in if you pass through that part of the country. Watch the riverboat moving down the Mississippi and you’re translplanted to the stories of Mark Twain. Relax on the stairs or lawn underneath at the foot of the Arch, and you may just be impressed, as I was, that it wasn’t cluttered up retail shops or street vendors hawking souvenirs.
- Luke warned me that I-70 would be filled with billboards for, ahem, adult established. Unless I haven’t been paying enough attention, I’ve only seen one or two of them.
- I’m due for breakfast in Kansas City in just under eight hours (9:00am CDT), and that includes a two-hour drive from Columbia. Better hit the hay.
