Destination St Louis
We picked the car up first thing this morning, a Jeep Patriot, and after a quick refresher lesson on how to drive an automatic and a trip to go and pick up our bags that we’d left at the hotel, it was time to hit the road. The journey would take us south west across the state of Illinois and into Missouri.
With such a long distance to travel in one day there wasn’t going to be a lot of stops along the way but we did manage a couple of breaks for some obligatory tourist photos with some of the Route 66 “giants”! We stopped off at the Beer Nuts factory in Bloomington to load up on some supplies but apart from that little detour we kept strictly to the Route.
Lunch gave us a chance to stop off at a Route 66 legend, the renowned Cozy Dogs, home of the original corn dog on a stick. Of course we were obliged to try one, washed down with some root beer.
Afterwards, I finally persuaded the wife to get behind the wheel and had a chance to relax a little and take over the navigating. After an hour or so I realised I much prefer driving to announcing “left here” or “stop sign” every few minutes!
When we were planning this trip we thought that this first leg would take us around 6 hours, and maybe an extra hour or so for stops. As the sun set we were still 50 miles from St Louis and had been on the road for 9 hours.
We then got lost!
I blame the marching band that had blocked all of the roads and the subsequent police detour. We tried to use our sat nav to correct us a little later, but it sent us in the wrong direction and by the time we realised, we had gone 10 miles in the wrong way!
Unable to put a postcode into the sat nav, we had to improvise and set it to take us to the heart of St Louis and hope we could find our way from there. But when we got there we got stuck in traffic as thousands of Cardinals fans spilled onto the streets after watching their team in the play-offs.
We finally arrived at the hotel at 8.30pm, just over 11 hours after leaving Chicago!
Miles travelled today: 330
Total miles travelled: 330
