June 20, 2007

Okay we got on the road leaving St. Joseph much earlier than we had been leaving. But I knew we needed to get to St Louis in time to do the Zoo and then get a little farther east/south.

We arrived at the zoo at 230pm Central. Just in time to get to the Sea Lion show at 3pm. It was really cool. We had great seats. The larger male sea lion, Alex, threw Frisbees into the crowd and Stephen caught one. It had teeth marks and smelled like fish but we thought that was really neat. Stephen was very excited. Unfortunately he stayed excited at each exhibit, and the Frisbee got left somewhere. We will have to go back to this zoo. It was huge and the boys and I stayed until it closed at 7pm but we still didn't get to see everything.

We got on the road and my goal was to try to get from St. Louis to Nashville. We would stay with some friends in Nashville, Jay and April Clark. We ended up having to stop around 10p and checking into a hotel because we were just so tired. I asked the lady at the check in desk how far we were from Nashville and she said about 4 hours. I was so surprised because I had figured us to be much closer than that.

I got into the room and the boys settled somewhat. I called Jay to let them know that we were not going to be able to make it that night. I mentioned we were 4 hours away and he said that made sense because we still had to go through Kentucky. Now, I am an amateur at map reading and thought I had been doing pretty good up until this point. The atlas I was using was one of the state by state things. I had followed interstate to 24 east and then to the state line of Illinois, where we had stopped. Then I picked it up again at the Tennessee line and calculated the mileage to their exit and added them together. After Jay mentioned Kentucky, I realized that I had completely forgotten that I had to take I-24 through another state!!! Oh well, we got a good nights sleep and headed out the next day!