Home - St. Louis - Kansas City (1)

Tuesday morning finally arrives and we are packed and ready to go! After making sure everything was taken care of, we bid our home goodbye and began our trip. We made it all of a quarter of a mile when the "Check Engine" light came on..... grrrrr....

Not wanting to start a month long trip with "anything" wrong, we quickly detoured back to Mike Smith's Toyota to have the problem analyzed. It did not take long for the Toyota Techs to run a diagnostic check and pronounce the non-existant problem corrected. Soon we were on our way, headed to St. Louis.

Nothing says you are headed west more than a picture of The St. Louis Gateway Arch. Just west of St. Louis we stopped to shop and have lunch.

Since we have plenty of time, we decided to make a side trip into downtown Kansas City to see the sites. Our original plan was to spend tonight somwhere near St. Joseph, MO.

As luck would have it, we had light showers as we checked out the downtown area. The larger portion of the storm moved over the north side of Kansas City and missed us entirely.

Downtown Kansas City is full of modern high rise buildings, fountains and beautifully restored architecture. It was well worth the drive through the rush hour traffic to take it all in.

The SPOT Satellite Tracker performed flawlessly. If you are not up to date on a SPOT Tracker, I will include a brief explanation. SPOT is a small, handheld, personal tracking device that transmits a signal via satellite, which is then registered on my web-based trip map. To see this map, simply click on the SPOT logo on the right sidebar of this page. SPOT can also be used to summon 911 help in case of an emergency.

Tonight we are staying just north of Kansas City in a small suburb called Blue Springs.

There are no short cuts to anywhere worth going! ~Unknown~

It is truly the ignorant man who would limit his knowledge to only his own personal experience. ~Scott McCarty~