2017 Road Trip – Day 5: Worlds Biggest Stuff

Today is the big travel day home. We aren’t even stopping much along the way. We’ve decided to take a short detour east so we can go through Indiana and miss most of the horrible traffic that exists between Chicago and Michigan.

We began the day driving through massive downpours almost all the way through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. We stopped at a Perkins somewhere in Arkansas because I’ve never been in the state and I can’t count it as having been there if we simply drive through and never set feet on the ground.  Now I can say I’ve been there, although we didn’t see much through the rain. We did count our blessings that the rain had held off for all of our earlier adventures though, because we had pretty darn good weather for most of our trip.

We headed north through Missouri then southern Illinois, where we found Casey, Illinois. I have always loved the idea of road trips because of those fun roadside attractions that you can spend 5-10 minutes at. These are often unplanned finds and, for us, Casey was one of those places. Casey is home to some of the World’s Largest Stuff… a lot of it actually. With 8-1/2 hours of driving this day, we didn’t opt to drive around Casey and see them all, but we did see the World’s Largest Wind Chimes, World’s Largest Rocking Chair and World’s Largest Mailbox. There were giant pencils, rulers, and other items scattered around town as well. It was a fun break and something that we had been missing the rest of the road trip.

We stopped for dinner in Terre Haute, Indiana. It wasn’t too far past Casey, but we were getting hungry at this point and wanted to see the city. Terre Haute is a nice size city and we found Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant and had very yummy supper.

We still had about 3 hours of driving left and arrived back in Michigan shortly after 10pm… not too shabby for a 600+ mile drive in a single day. Looking back, I think if we were to do it over, I would have stayed in Indianapolis for the night and stopped a few more times along the way. Spending almost the entire day in the car was a bit of a challenge. In the end, we came pretty close to our $1000 budget and Indianapolis would have pushed us too far over, so it was the right choice at the time and we made it just fine.

As I mentioned in Day 1, here are our final Road Trip stats:

• Elapsed time: 5 days, 4 nights
• States visited: 7 (Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana)
• Major Cities visited: 2 (St. Louis, Memphis)
• Miles driven: 1430
• Steps taken: 34,438 (we did really well the first couple days, then fizzled out)
• Attractions/Sites visited: over 20
• Hard Rock Shot Glasses added to collection: 2 (St. Louis & Memphis)

I hope you enjoyed following along, but more importantly; I hope this brief road trip, planned on the fly, has inspired you to get out and start living your bucket list. I’ve added as many links to these 5 blog posts as I could, to give you more information if you want to see any of the places we did, so no more excuses.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be big. You don’t have to do it all. You just have to start… somewhere.

 

 

 

2017 Road Trip – Day 3: Elephant Rocks, Mill & Covered Bridge, Cape Girardeau

We woke up today with another long day of driving ahead… destination Memphis, Tennessee. We scheduled several stops along the way again to break up the monotony and give us a chance to get out and stretch a bit.

Our fist stop after leaving St. Louis was Elephant Rocks State Park in Arcadia Valley, Missouri. Arcadia Valley is located in the Mark Twain National Forest and Ozarks area and has enough nature and hiking that a week trip here would be perfectly reasonable… we had about an hour. Elephant Rocks State Park was a bit out of our way, but well worth the additional drive time. An accessible, 1-mile long path winds among giant granite boulders, which can be climbed on… great fun for kids and adults alike. Part of the area has been quarried and stone-smiths would carve their names in the rock when they received their master certification, giving the appearance of heavy graffiti throughout the site. There is an additional 1/2-mile extension for those who are looking for an extended experience, but we had a bit of a late start and opted to get back to the car instead.

The drive through this part of Missouri is beautiful. It was a beautiful, sunny day and a perfect time to put the convertible top down and enjoy the amazing vistas. Our next destination, although we were enjoying the scenery and not in a hurry to arrive, was Burfordville, Missouri. There is a mill and restored covered bridge there and it was another beautiful place to get out and walk around a bit.

It was a hop, skip and a jump (aka: a short distance) from the mill to Cape Girardeau, Missouri for supper. Before heading into town, we detoured across the cool bridge to Illinois and then right back again… ’cause bridges are fun and cool to look at! We were planning to arrive much earlier than we actually did, so we looked for somewhere to eat fairly quickly before continuing the 175 more miles of driving to Memphis.

After having a delicious and reasonable Cajun dinner at Broussard’s, we now hoped to arrive in Memphis around 9pm… significantly later than we hoped, but still in time to go check out Beale Street before hitting the hay. Unfortunately the universe had other plans for us. Just before leaving Missouri, we got stuck in stopped traffic in a single-lane construction zone. Traffic remained stopped for an hour, so we turned off the car. I had the joy of experiencing a construction port-a-potty for the first, and hopefully last, time during this extreme slow down. Once we were moving again, I was surprised to discover we were travelling through Arkansas (we’re playing this by ear remember, so I haven’t looked too closely at an overall map), and even more surprised when we drove through Memphis and into Southaven, Mississippi to find our hotel for the next 2 days. Turns out Southaven is only a 10-15 minute drive from Memphis and a convenient place to stay. We arrived at the hotel after 11pm, exhausted and thankful for somewhere to sleep, having forgotten all about our plans to see Beale street that evening. There’s always tomorrow….