Missouri, or, Standing on the corner of 12th street and Vine

St. Louis to Topeka (9/11):
Because of the boring intricacies of rental car contracts and the terms of insurance, we can only have our rental car for 31 days at a time before it costs us a lot of extra money. Therefore, we have to return to Knoxville, TN every 31 days to exchange cars. Before we started, that sounded like a lot of time. We're realizing now, however, that the US is giant, and to hit all the things we want to visit in South Dakota, Wyoming and the northwest, we're having to hurry across the middle of the US to get there. Thus, today's whirlwind tour of Missouri.

We spent the morning in St. Louis at the Gateway Arch and Courthouse. As I mentioned yesterday, the Arch is even better than expected, and we spent a lovely morning at the park at the base of the arch, standing in the Mississippi River, and going up to the observation deck at the top in these futuristic space-pods that rotate so they stay upright the whole way up the arch.

At the base of the arch is the Museum of Westward Expansion, which has a ton of details about early American explorers, US territorial expansion, and the Native Americans murdered and displaced by all of this. Across from the arch is the courthouse where the Dred Scott case was originally tried here before it made its way to the Supreme Court in the years before the Civil War.

St. Louis was a nice place of symbolism for our west-bound trip--in addition the Gateway Arch and sticking our feet in the Mississippi, we also made a wrong turn and happily found ourselves on Route 66 and later had our first meal of the trip at Jack and the Box.

After St. Louis, we made a brief stop in Jefferson City, capital of Missouri, and saw their giant state capital building that is modeled on the U.S. capital in Washington. We followed this with an even briefer drive-by of the downtown of Independence, MO where Harry Truman was from. We stopped in Kansas City long enough for BBQ and ended the day in Topeka, Kansas.
-M