10 States... 4 Days

These 4 days were by-far the roughest of the trip. I have never spent so much time in a vehicle in my life. We wanted to breeze through the central US so that we could get to the northeast before it got too late.

We made a quick drive-thru of Reno. I don't know... maybe it's because we had already seen Vegas, but Reno was kind of a dump.

After leaving Reno, we continued eastward. We were in middle Nevada when I noticed a sign warning of an icy bridge ahead. It was fairly comical considering it was over 100 degrees outside. It couldn't have been 15 seconds later that I noticed a fence and sign that warned of scalding water. I was busy chuckling to myself about the icy bridge and scalding water being next to each other when Liz noticed the slew of thermal vents along the side of the road. There were probably 20 of these steam vents along the side of the interstate.

I'm chronicling mountain letters in the western US. Apparently everyone wants to say something on the side of a mountain. It must be hard work making these letters because people always seem to stop after the first one. It doesn't make for much of a message.

This is the beginnings of the salt flats in Nevada. This whole area is the bed of an ancient lake, but is now completely flat desert land. People come out here to race and test out new automobile designs.

Hey, your guess is as good as mine... I don't know what the hell this is. We came across this thing while we were going through the salt flats. Looks like a monument to tennis balls to me.

The sunsets just seem to be prettier out west than they are in the east.

After going through Salt Lake City, we were heading back into the mountainous areas.

For a significant portion of the day we followed the interstate through Wyoming. Like many of the western states, Wyoming is pretty, but pretty desolate also.

In Wyoming we came across another large grouping of windmills. I think they must have had some bad storms here, because many of the windmills had broken blades.

A few miles down the road, we hit what was probably the storm that broke the windmills. The clouds from this storm hung very close to ground. I spent the majority of the time looking for tornadoes.

Later along the highway, we came to the Lincoln Monument... well, the Wyoming Lincoln Monument. Wyoming's version is just an angry Lincoln head overlooking the interstate.

After cutting across Wyoming, we headed south into Colorado. The border is marked by a giant, featureless black buffalo.

We stayed the night in Denver, but did not stay for too long the next day. I took a picture of this building figuring that it was a museum, aquarium, CIA office, or something else interesting. It turns out that its a phone company. Exciting.

We took one last picture of Denver and then continued east.

Well this is Kansas. This is pretty much how ALL of Kansas looks.

Oh yeah, there are a lot of silos in Kansas too... but that really is it. Kansas was not one of the more exciting states.

On the fourth day of the eastward trek, we stopped at the University of Missouri. This is the school that Liz's mom and brother attended.

This is the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house. This is the Univ. of Missouri chapter of the sorority that Liz was in at Auburn.

This piece of modern artwork is actually off campus at a bank in the small downtown area. I'm not quite sure what it is supposed to be, but it looks like several very large people falling off of the side of the Earth.

I believe this is the school mascot. I know very little about this university, but when you have a 5 foot tall bronze statue of an animal at the entrance to your school, mascot is a pretty good guess.

Ahhh... St. Louis. This was an unscheduled stop on the trip, but when I realized that we would be driving by the Gateway Arch, I figured we had to stop.

Right next to the Gateway Arch is the Edward Jones Dome, home of the St. Louis Rams.

On the waterfront right beyond the arch, there are several paddleboats. This particular one has been converted to a casino and permanently docked.

This is a shot of the arch from underneath. It's pretty impressive. You can actually take a tram to the top and look at the city from over 600 feet in the air. I really wanted to take the tram, but Liz had heard that it gets very claustrophobic at the top. Luckily for Liz, the tram tickets were sold out for the day anyway.

Of course, we had to do our traditional self-portrait to prove we were actually there. For as big as the arch is, you wouldn't think it would be so hard to find, but somehow we took 5 pictures of ourselves and missed the arch. Finally, on the sixth one we got it right.

On the final stretch of the day we ran into nasty weather again. When we were out west, we didn't see rain for almost two weeks, now that we were back in the east it's almost everyday