Road Trip Recap: Day 5

Our cool Missouri waitress in background

best gas station purchase

Fort Messac rest stop

I LOVED Kentucky!!!!!

St, Louis from the back window

Road trip shirts officially decorated

Happy New Year!

Grand Ole Opry entrance

New Year's in Nashville! I wish we would have had more time to see more of the cities and towns we drove through. Its a good way to decide where you'd like to go back to though. My memory of the trip isn't as fresh as it was so this will likely be a shorter post. Still shaky on the drive but we're managing. Alignment must be off because the steering wheel shakes at high speeds which causes extra PTSD! Along with the wind, which never seemed to stop. We fueled up at a Denny's in Columbia, MO and had the greatest waitress. She was a firecracker with a twang who kept calling us "ladybugs". Loved her! We stopped at a gas station to make sure we could make it to Nashville by tonight. I found a hilarious biker face mask which provided us with some car entertainment for a while. Drove through St. Louis and saw the Peace Arch which was cool, but other than that and our waitress, I didn't get a good vibe from Missouri. We were told not to stay in St. Louis at all, especially East St. Louis. So in case you're traveling that way, it might prove to be helpful for you. Best tourist attraction and rest stop all in one...Fort Messac. Just outside of a city called Metropolis (think Superman). Cleanest bathrooms including Christmas decorations and plants, a Christmas tree in the main foyer, and the nicest lady 'manning' the place. We took photos of ourselves in the Superman cut out, of course. Creepy trucker or tourist guy hanging out way too long trying to chat us up when the conversation was clearly over...it was late and dark. We moved on fast after that. Made it to Nashville at 11:00 pm just in time to check in, crack the champagne, decorate our RTC t-shirts with all the places we'd been so far, and cheers to the New Year! Awesome organic pink champagne hauled from Calgary (Willow Park Liquors), YUM. We actually got turned around coming into town and ended up at a pretty seedy gas station on Main Street. Mary was beginning to get stressed so we pulled out the computer and looked for a route through town to our hotel. We made it! Our hotel is right across from the Grand Ole Opry and hotel in Music Valley. Had we known and had more energy, we would have driven downtown to watch the guitar drop at midnight and hear some music. But walking around the Opry was right up our alley and incredible to see. I need to get back to Nashville for sure. We didn't make it to the infamous Bluebird or Loveless Cafes, next time. They were too far out and time was beginning to become more of an issue to get Mary to NC on time to start work. Our hotel was the most expensive and worst one of the trip, toilet didn't work and no maintenance on call. No more rooms available. Mary booked through Hotels.com as well, so trying to rebook somewhere else, etc...too much of a hassle. We had a great night. Mary slept better than I did thanks to a humming and banging from the microwave. Next morning, the restaurants were buzzing with people! We managed to ask a hotel staff member at a different hotel than ours where to go and hit up the local Shoney's. Managed to find our way out of town alright and headed to our final destination (well, Mary's anyway)...North Carolina. Exciting! (I forgot that we drove through Kentucky...ate in a town called 'Peducah' which if you're an SLP or neurologist, you would first think of "puh-tuh-kuh' which is so cool! But we learned that the town is actually pronounced "puh-doo-kuh"). Loved the accent and the peeps. Must go back but not sure for what...Fort Knox or the Derby I guess. We're almost to NC and the trip is coming to an end...so sad!