2015-8-24---on to St. Louis

 

Next day both "kids" took off to work---first day for Faith at her new job.  So we jumped in the car and continued our trip to St. Louis.  This portion was about 550 miles.  Got to drive through more mountains.

  Another thing I like to take pictures of while we're riding along is old barns.  Certainly have a lot of them in the midwest.

Usually we take the northern route from Knoxville to St. Louis.  But it's suppose to be quicker going through Nashville.  So we decided to go that way this time.  We were making great time---no delays at all in Nashville---then came across the first of the truck accidents in our way.  This one had happened about 5 hours earlier and had a fatality, but traffic was slowly getting by here.

 Shortly after we got past that wreck, we saw smoke in the distance.  We tried to get a radio update or internet update from my phone of what was going on, but didn't find it until it was too late.   3 or 4 miles of highway were shut down because of another semi accident.  After sitting in the car so long, I decided to walk down with the hordes of other people to see what was going on.

 2 hours later and still a lot of work to do to get things going.  So when I got back to the car, we did what most of the other cars did and drove across the median to the other side and took the detour around.

Made for an already long trip even longer.  We did stop about 100 miles from St. Louis and had dinner and visited with my brother and sister-in-law in southern Illinois.  We ended up leaving there around 10 pm.  
Got into St. Louis after 11pm.  Assessed the house.  We had the ac shut off (later I was reminded the ac doesn't work---we had to have Freon added to it the last 2 summers, but we didn't need it our first week so we didn't bother have more added for 1 week).  Apparently our family room floors didn't like not having ac and buckled pretty badly.  I figure they'll go back down in the winter, but for now we walked up and down mountains in the family room.
Now was the start of a busy 2 weeks in St. Louis.