In my opinion, the first day of a trip like this can be one of two things: Either you can take a short drive just to get on the road and get the system down, or you can make it an all out rush in the direction of everything you’re trying to see, with the goal of getting as far away from home as possible before you collapse. Just like last time, we chose the long version of Day 1. Our goal was to make it past Omaha, which would put us within 8 hours of Mount Rushmore, the first official sight to see on our great big trip.

So we burst out of Nashville bright and early! Maybe it was more like 10:00 AM. But we certainly did burst. And there was no stopping us! We were knocking off states left and right... Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois. No problem. Then when it came time to snap a few pictures during our quick Saint Louis Arch drive-by we hit a wall of traffic. It appeared that they were working on every interstate road that went through Saint Louis, and unluckily for us, we were planning on driving on all of them on our way through. This traffic was the worst kind of traffic. The dreaded stop-and-go traffic. And we were both stopping and going for about two hours. And those two extra hours were enough to blow our first day's efficiency. The good news is that Jenny was able to shoot nearly 50 pictures of the Arch, which we had planned to visit on the last leg of our trip home. I think we're already sick of Saint Louis.

Once we made it through the city, the rest of Missouri flew by. We ran into almost no trouble, and since Jenny had packed our food so well, we really didn't need to stop too much.

The highlight of the day for me just might have been seeing the RV that was towing a helicopter.

We made it to Mound City, Iowa by 10:30 PM and decided to stay in a little place called 'Audry's Hotel". We could tell that this place was probably state of the art in 1971, and they still had a lot of the original furniture to prove it. Off to bed we went with visions of carved presidents dancing in our heads.