Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 10 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

By now we were pretty good at the morning routine: wake up, get dressed, pack, check out of the hotel, load the car, grab breakfast, and hit the road. Today was going to be a long driving day, all the way to St. Louis, so we planned to break it up with fun little side trips.

At Welcome Center just over the Iowa border we found the M. V. Sergeant Floyd, named after the only casualty on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

We continued south through Iowa and decided to pop over into Omaha, Nebraska for lunch (so we could count another state on our trip ;-)). We had lunch downtown at California Tacos and More which we had seen on Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives. The line was almost out the door (which was a good sign) but it was worth the wait. The California tacos are pretty good!

Back on the highway, we continued south through Iowa, bordering Kansas just off to the west (on our right). Just like with Nebraska, as we approached the Kansas City area we actually took another short detour to drive into Kansas so we could say we had been there. I was surprised how large Kansas City, MO is. Being a baseball fan, I had to snap a photo of the Royals’ ballpark as we drove by:

Now we were headed east to St. Louis on I-70. It was strange to see lettered routes on the highway signs, like K, ZZ, etc. With all of our little stops during the day, our estimated arrival time in St. Louis was getting later and later. We decided to push on without dinner and finally got into the city and our downtown hotel around sunset.

We were going to grab a takeout pizza from The Good Pie but the concierge at our hotel recommended Maurizio’s since they would deliver right to our room. While waiting for the pizza to arrive I took my daughter down to the pool and let her burn off some excess energy after being stuck in the car all day. We had dinner in the room (the salad from Maurizio’s was good but the pizza was so-so) and then turned in for the night. Tomorrow, the Arch!

GPS statistics after Day 7: