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the road home

Leaving Mesa Verde, we still weren't entirely sure of our plan. In the immediate, we set out for Durango. En route, as my ankle continued to throb in pain, we decided to skip Great Sand Dunes NP. We got to Durango, walked around for a little bit and grabbed lunch at a Mexican restaurant. Since we'd decided to skip Great Sand Dunes and already knew the baseball game was not going to happen, we were bound and determined to get home as fast as possible.

After lunch, we hopped in the car and started driving, trying to get as far east as possible, but still with the goal of going to Kansas. Both of our GPSs told us that heading south and driving back along I-40 would be the fastest route, but the thought of driving that again was rather unappealing and wouldn't have taken us through Kansas. So we headed to Colorado Springs. We ate dinner in the parking lot of a gas station somewhere in Colorado. Somewhere around this time, the lift mechanism that keeps the door of my trunk open quit functioning. That made making sandwiches a week bit difficult.We made it to a KOA in Limon, CO that night where we picked up I-70. We pitched the tent and walking back from the bathroom, it started to rain and we made it into the tent as it started pouring. The next morning, we spent some time letting things dry out before repacking them. While we waited, we downloaded a new audiobook for the drive home.

We hit Kansas pretty quickly and we were in Kansas FOREVER. Our one stop other than gas, was at the Oz museum in Wamego. My standard for marking off a state on my list is that you have to spend the night there or actually DO something there. And this was all we did. Thankfully, student tickets were only $2 because the $7 adult entrance fee would NOT have been worth it. I'm not quite sure what I had hoped for, but I was disappointed in the museum. The were lots of artifacts from the movie, advertisements, happy meal toys, and many versions of the Oz books. Each character had a display, but they were kind of lame and you could not touch them- disappointing for she who likes to pose with statues.

From there, we just kept driving. And driving. And driving. We got to St Louis just in time to hit rush hour and kept driving. We knew we did not want to stop in East St Louis (thank you, Jonathan Kozol) and we had no idea where any campgrounds in St Louis were, other than a KOA south of the city and we needed to keep heading east. Not to mention that the temperature as we headed east and down out of high elevations had gone up 20 degrees and the humidity had increased by 200,000%. We wound up that last night at a Super 8 motel somewhere east of East St Louis.

In the morning, we got up and drove the last 5 hours home, finishing our last audiobook as we crossed from Kentucky into Tennessee and never have I been so happy to see Nashville.

Labels: roadtrip '10, travel

posted by CP @ 8:57 PM 0 thoughts