3500 Miles: Day Three

All along, day three promised to be rough. The goal was to get from Columbus to Kansas City. That's about 650 miles. In between start and finish are Indianapolis, St. Louis, all of Illinois, and some thriving farmland.

To be honest, I don't remember much about this day. It was the longest day in terms of miles. I know we managed to go the whole way without getting stuck in traffic (except for a bit around St. Louis). This was a pleasant trend of the trip as a whole. Very little on the way of traffic jams, even with loads of construction. Also, it never rained. It rained every day in Massachusetts for approximately 3 years while we lived there. It poured while I was picking up the rental truck. Then, Sunday, it stopped. We hit some sprinkles in Utah (or possibly Wyoming), but nothing of note.

But back to Day Three. We just drove and drove and drove. We discovered some things about truckers, as we parked among them at rest stops. Many travel with small dogs. We also saw quite a few trucker couples. These couples often didn't fit the overweight, shabbily dressed trucker stereotype. Maybe b/c they had someone to look nice for on the road.

Another discovery was the rest stop Subway. There's nothing that screams tasty fresh like a Subway in a gas station. Those ingredients have neglect and disease written all over them. That was a one-time mistake somewhere in the midwest.

As for the cat, she was handling the trip well. The cat carrier was a brief pitstop on her way to spending the trip on M-N's lap. She slept most of the way, as cats do, but that's better than crying, as she's been known to do.

By Day Three, I stopped caring about whether the car was still being towed. I'd come to learn that the fastening job Will and I did in MA was solid, which freed me from spending far too much time looking at the mirror, looking for the shadow of the car.

Day Three ended, like every other day, with confusion and turmoil. Kansas City, Missouri turned out to be awful, with bridges and arteries and difficult to follow roads going up and down until I was worried we were back in Illinois. But then we were in Kansas, in Kansas City, Kansas, to be more precise. We stumbled around there, too, but eventually found my Aunt's house, and she was a great host.