Don't Meet me in St. Louis, Louis!

Ah, road trips...so many twists and turns and interesting finds.

Like this house and picket fence.  It's Mark Twain's childhood home in Hannibal, Mo!
Across the street is his father's law office.

Behind me, somewhere, is some guy with a ventriloquist puppet.  No he wasn't a ventriloquist, as his mouth moved more than the dummy's, but he was nice - said hello, and welcomed us to Hannibal.

This part of town was...well, creepy.

It's hard to put it in words, but let me put it this way: you know in the movies when the characters enter a town and they just know something isn't right, but they don't know what...until it's too late.  This part of Hannibal is THAT town.

As icing on the cake, there were two kids walking around - one as Huck Finn and the other as Becky.  They didn't look to be enjoying their "roles."

We moved on...quickly.

St. Louis, Mo...

St. Louis was not what we expected.  I'm not sure what we expected...but this wasn't it.

For some reason I thought there would be a skyline...buildings, etc.  There wasn't.  Waterloo, Ia has bigger buildings.  Yep, we drove by the Arch, but had to drive by 100 Corvettes to do so as there was some sort of show going on.  This slowed traffic down a bit...little did we know that "traffic" would be our issue.

St. Louis is dirty too.  I know cities aren't naturally clean...but St. Louis was noticeably dirty.

We didn't bother seeing much more of the arch.  We were hungry.  We ate at a place called "Big Daddy's." Decent food.

Then the problems started...

All we had to do was get on 55 South and we would be on our way to Memphis.  Simple right?

Not so!

55 has many on ramps from the city, for sure.  One of them would have made us go by the Vett show and we didn't want to do that.  So we found another ramp...only to find it closed.  Oh, there was no warning that it was closed, until you came upon the ramp and almost ran into the sign.

As for a detour...there was none.  Evidently in St. Louis, they can't be bothered with detouring you around their fair city.

We did located another ramp - as did our fellow travellers - only to find THAT ramp closed too!  The heck!

And nope, there were no detour signs at this one either.

Tough luck Charlie!

After much circling around and cursing we did find another exit, and THIS one was open.  We gunned it, before they changed their minds!

I will say, thanks to having a map feature on our phones saved our sanity - it was able to locate the ramps for us.

This event had left us a bit exhausted.  Neither of us could bear much more of driving around.  So despite our best laid plans, we decided to stop at Cape Girardeau.

A very interesting town in it's own right, but it's NO St. Louis.

It is interesting as poverty is much more visible.  We drove around Cape G. and had crossed a highway and into...well a ghetto as we had never seen before - well not me anyway.

"Run down" isn't a word to describe it.

For all the crap I give Minneapolis from time to time...the "oldness" of the buildings and sections of neighborhoods was...different...

All the while, the city, like any other city tries to look like every other city...hiding it's flaws, trying to push back what it doesn't want you to see.

Funny too, because there are an awful lot of churches too.

We are in our room now, watching TV...cable TV no less! A true luxury for us!

Tomorrow: Memphis!