Today we drove out of St. Louis, discovering some of the not-so-nice neighborhoods of the north end of the city. Some of the buildings were half standing, most were boarded up. You can tell that middle-america really took a hit from the recent economic downturn. We drove on, still on I-70, the road we had been on for 3 days since Baltimore, taking it though Missouri and Kansas. This proved to be one of the most straining drives yet.
Picture the most desolate flat barren fields, with a terrain completely void of all variance. The only things that peaked our interest was the massive 30 mile strip of wind turbines that sprung up in the middle of the state, and a little old man in the train junction town of Park, Kansas where we got gas.
We had a 15 minute conversation with him about football. He discovered we were Ravens fans, and he happened to be a Steelers Fan. At 4pm, we may very well have been his first human contact of the day. Nevertheless he was one of the nicest people we have met so far on this trip (besides the bartender at our St. Louis hotel who gave us extra beers) and he had been at his lonely job for 42 years straight. That's the kind of America I was hoping to discover a part of on this trip, even if I never had any desire to live in that location.
After the 8 grueling hours of Kansas, we ascended into the Denver-Boulder area this evening and are overjoyed and giddy at returning to a bustling metropolis. Since driving through Denver, and walking around the University Hill neighborhood of Boulder, we are no longer anxious to return to the east coast. Tomorrow should be a good day.
Afterall, we aren't in the northeast right now, where Connecticut got its record snowfall ever. A little more than 2 feet over the day today. Its a good thing we went though Ohio back on Monday. We would have gone right through that storm when it was still massing in Kentucky.
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