Road Trips and Hike Reports

My Dad's flight out of KC was at 6:05 am. So we did our best to get to bed before 8 pm on Friday night.  We were awake slightly before our 3 am alarm time.  We got to the airport before 4 am so my Dad certainly had plenty of time to navigate through it.  I headed East on I-435 from the airport then south on MO-291 and South on I-470 until I got to US-50.  I then stayed on US-50 all the way through Missouri until it dumps onto I-44 in the far Western suburbs of Saint Louis.  To get around STL I took I-44 East to I-270 and eventually I-255 and finally a few miles on I-64 until that road crossed US-50.  Then I drove all of IL and IN on US-50 East. I had hoped to make it as far as Cincinatti OH before calling it a night Saturday but as it started to get dark, my 13 hours of being awake with a short night of sleep the night before suddenly seemed like plenty even though I still had a few dozen miles of Indiana left before entering Ohio.  I stayed in the sma...

We spent the day doing basic getting to know you stuff here in Kansas City.  I walked 2 blocks downhill to get bagels in the morning.  This entire area (Power & Light district) of KC is very gentrified and newly developed or re-developed.  The bagel shop looks like a hipster coffee shop with mismatched but pretty wooden tables and an old time glass case for the bagels etc.  Those types of places always rub me a little as trying too hard but the bagel was at least adequate.   Then we walked to the River Market district about 10 blocks away.  On the way we visited the central library .  The library was large and clean and had a few gallery spaces etc in it.  I thought the very political installation about native Americans was kind of whiny but Brian thought it was powerful.  There were some homeless people there and one very odd guy seemed to always be near us at the library and then when we left he absolutely followed us until we exi...

Brian drove us from Starved Rock to breakfast in Lacon IL and then on to the hike near Forrest City IL.  We drove along the swollen Illinois River for a good part of the trip.  Basically we spent the last 2 or 3 days focused on, hiking near, driving along and looking at the Illinois river.  It was an interesting character in the story of our trip so far.  The setting for the hike was very nice.  Sand Ridge state forest is an isolated quiet spot, we saw only 1 other vehicle and zero people on foot the entire time we were there. It's a nice stand of predominantly pine trees with a sandy soil.  The hike I found on Alltrails was called 'Orange trail' but we found out after an hour that following the orange blazes didn't keep us on track where we planned to be.  Really there was no difference between any of the trails and paths that are blazed. They are all covered in sand, sometimes deep sand, and probably mostly intended for equestrians.  So we used ...

The day started out leaving our cabin fairly early in the morning.  We took Arkansas 7 North for a few curvy and foggy hours and then US-65 up through Branson Missouri.  My old friend US-60 led us East for hours all the way to Paducah with only brief diversions on other roads.  It was all very peaceful but also seemingly endless.  In a way it isn't surprising as this was the first day of the 'lets get home' portion of the trip so it was a lot of miles to cover. For a leg stretcher I used Alltrails and found a hike in the Mark Twain National Forest that was pretty close to our US-60 through route.  What I didn't look at in detail (and would have been challenging to determine quickly) was that this trail started about 6 miles off of a paved road.  So while not a very long in miles journey, it was a little more rugged to get to it than we were hoping for as a quick mid-trip walk.  It was also a little remote with marginal cell service and warnings abou...