Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and...

maybe North Carolina, all in one day. We hope to get home tonight, if we are not too tired. We'll see.

Last night we had this view from our hotel room...

Then later, we were up in the arch! I was pointing towards home...while Poppop was thinking about the trip on Rte 66, which was out the other windows of the arch..

Getting down from the arch, we rode in a little room with no windows that rocks like a ferris wheel ride. It was a little scary...

But we got down safely....6000 people a day ride up and down inside the arch just to get to the top and see the view. http://www.enchantedlearning.com/history/us/monuments/stlouisarch/

Best of all, after the arch, we dressed up nice and went to dinner at a restaurant that turned around....in one hour and 45 minutes, the round restaurant turned around one whole revolution. That means that while we were enjoying our dinner, we got to see all of St. Louis, plus the sunset and plus a lightning storm way out on the horizon.

Oklahoma!

HI, Mia, Simon, and Charles!

Wow...I have been toooo busy to blog. BUT today we thought about Charlie, Simon and Mia because we saw lots of antique toys...and a crazy airplane made out of cut up coca cola cans. We were in a museum in Elk City, Oklahoma. Can you guess how old those dolls are? and the car and bicycle? Poppop saw plenty of old cars today. which are like old toys to him!!!

We visited an old school house that was last used 80 years ago. These are the rules that the teachers had to obey in order to work as a teacher at this school...wow...I don't think I could be a teacher then.

Tomorrow, we are going to St. Louis, MO...I am excited because I have always wanted to go back there...I took your mommy there in 1989...we rode to the top and saw far, far away..

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Gateway_Arch.html

more later...Love, Nana...

California!

Today, we made it to California, and it was SOOOOOOO hot! 117 degrees. And the last two hours of our ride, we decided we needed to turn off the air conditioning because the engine was getting very hot...220 degrees. So we rolled down the windows and sped to the border and a nice cool hotel. You can see the road stretching way out ahead of us in this picture. Why do you think the air conditioner made the engine run hotter?

PopPop and I kind of got to laughing about the air conditioning, though...because so far, the car seems to be falling apart - the tissue box fell off, a grease cap on the wheel came off, a hub cap came off, the cruise control stopped working, and the engine overheated so we had to turn off the air conditioning. We are wondering what the car will look like when we roll back into our driveway in Raleigh in a few weeks...

We drove from Las Cruces, New Mexico into Arizona, through Tucson, past Phoenix, and ended in Blythe, California. Can you find those cities on your map of America? The mountains all around us were very beautiful, but dry and rocky, with no trees or grass on them

All through Arizona, we saw lots of dust devils. I kept wondering how they form and swirl around. They look like little tornadoes. Do you know how the wind and dust come together to make these tornadoes?

Http://www.gc.maricopa.edu/earthsci/imagearchive/dust_devils.htm

More tomorrow...

Windmills and Tin Men...

For Chas, Simon, and Mia...and Danny, too!

Oh, the sites we've seen in this amazing country. We passed miles of windmills in Texas, and then we saw the windmill parts being transported along the highway... How much electricity can we generate with windmills? http://www.windmillworld.com/windmills/faq.htm

I was driving when PopPop took the pictures. We were on Highway 10 between Ozona and Fort Stockton in Texas. Can you find that on a US map?

The speed limit was 80 miles an hour, but PopPop said I could not drive that fast. So I drove at 65 miles per hour. How many miles did I drive in five hours if I was driving that fast? How many miles would I have driven if PopPop said I could go 80 miles an hour? How much earlier would we have arrived in Las Cruces, New Mexico? We actually arrived at 3:15. BUT that was on Mountain time...so really, by the time we had been driving all day, we arrived at 4:15.

It was a long day for Nana and PopPop, so we really appreciated a good hotel with a nice big window to watch the evening thunder and wind storm, and also a pool and hot tub. We felt like the Tin Man we saw earlier in San Antonio, in someone's garden...Do you remember what movie the Tin Man is in? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Woodman

If you solve the problem of speed and distance, write and tell me the answer. Then I can tell PopPop how much sooner we'll get to Rte 66 if he lets me drive faster...

Route 66 - Here we come!

We drove a long, hard day today....including one long stretch of five hours without a stop, all to get across Texas, from San Antonio to just past El Paso - a total of 623 miles. We have another long day tomorrow, but we should end that day at the beginning of Route 66...Poppop's dream come true!