Fantastic last 2 days

Yesterday I got to spend the day in St. Louis. I was expecting to see just a store made from wood with a large black woman with half moon spectacles, sat out front in a rocking chair doing some knitting and a river next to her with one of those big paddle boats, all in sepia tone! Instead I got a very large city, looked very upmarket, lots of nice hotels and very clean. So I guess I must have been thinking of a wrong town or decade or both! They had this amazing round object in the air, the pic won't do justice to the size and magnificence of it.





I have better pics on my camera, just doing all this from the iPhone. So I just had a walk round and sat at a restaurant in this really nice cobbled area of the city near the waterfront where all the bars and restaurants where.





Was walking back to the car and saw this building. It looks like a building has been knocked down next to them so instead of putting new windows in to keep in line with the top and front of their building, they just painted them on! Only the top 6 or so floors are proper windows! You should be able to click on the pic to see bigger





Then at about 10ish last night, I left St. Louis and decided to start on route 66. Route 66 (also known as 'The mother road" is a long route the starts in Chicago and goes all the way to the West coast and it's slowly disappearing and so is all the trade alongside it as 'super' highways of just Tarmac and trees takeover with big chain restaurants and hotels dotted around. It's a shame really, USA is losing it's character. I was lucky enough to see it as a kid with my parents and can see the changes.

Anyway, so last night, the first part wasn't great, just a road running alongside the new highway. I did about 4 hours and decided to sleep in the car! Which was good because I then got an early start next morning. That's when it started getting good, in fact I had to stop taking pics because I was stopping every 5 minutes and getting nowhere fast! Here's some











Some parts where like a ghost town. Like people had just packed up years ago and never bothered coming back. These were taken at an old mining village in Kansas











I also went to a place called 'Branson' which was really nice, it looked like a holiday place, where people had cabins, lots of trees and lakes up in the hills, kind of like our Lake District but a lot bigger! The next pic is the oldest road of Route 66, it was built in 1922 and only 8 feet wide and crumbling badly! I'm so glad I had a hire car and not my own!


This is the dust it created in my rear view mirror. I lost the cops like they do in the movies!


So then I went through Kansas state and then to Tulsa, nothing much happening there so I'm now in Oklahoma City, I was dying to say to someone 'Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more." but I couldn't find anyone called Toto, so I didn't bother!

I've done about 1,500 miles so far (not all of them in the right direction!!), I've driven through a time zone and got an extra hour (think I've find a way of keeping young!) and on the road so far, I've seen 3 dead Deer, 2 Armadillo and an overturned lorry in a central reservation....I'm thinking at this rate, I will be able to rewrite 'The 12 days of Christmas"! (Think about it!)