Life After Cows...Trip Part Two...

Last time I think I left you in West Virginia, where Jim and I enjoyed our first weekend away with my sister and brother in law. 

On Monday morning we packed up our car and headed into the "unknown".  We knew that our next destination would be Hesston Kansas, where our daughter is in college, but we didnt' know exactly which route we would take or where all we might stop.

We wound our way through the mountains of West Virginia, and ended up on Route 64 in Charleston, where we began our trek west towards Jenna.  There were lots of hills and lots of hairpin turns on those roads for the first hour or so!

Kentucky was the first state that we entered that we had never been in before...

What I remember the most, was the amount of steel bridges that we saw and crossed!  It made me think of Eric, who will soon graduate with a degree in Civil Engineering.  Steel structures are in his area of interest...

We found a motel just east of St Louis, where we spent the night.  We hoped to go up into the arch the next morning, but were unable to purchase any tickets online.  Bummer!  Or so we thought.  We decided to stop anyway, and were pleasantly surprised that we could still buy tickets on sight.

It was a gorgeous day!

I must say that if you are at all claustrophobic (which I am) the ride to the top of the tower is a bit of a stretch.  You sit in a small pod with up to four other people, your knees all touching and your shoulders a bit hunched so that you don't bang your head for the 4 minute ride to the top.  The view however, was worth it...

Looking east.  That's the Cargill grain elevator in the front center of the picture, with a barge apparently loading some grain.

Looking to the west.  The St Louis Cardinals baseball stadium is on the far left side of the picture...

The Mississippi River was quite muddy and very high.  I have never really seen it up close before to be able to compare it to "normal", but there were several docks just below us that were partially under water.  There was also a lot of debris in the water that had been caught up in piles near the shore.  A lot of the water from the flooding upstream was clearly making it's way south...

After we came down from the arch, we found a place to grab some lunch, and hopped back in the car for the rest of our trip towards Hesston.

We stopped at a car museum that we saw along Route 70 in western Missouri...

...and made our way southwest from Kansas City just before dark.  If you enlarge the picture, you can see a line of fire on the hillside in the distance.  It's the time of year that farmers burn their fields...

...a beautiful Kansas sunset...as beautiful as it could be from a moving car window anyway...

Finally, look who we found!  We haven't seen her since Christmas!

More next time on our adventures in Kansas and beyond!

Life After Cows...Trip Part One...

When Jim and I first started thinking about selling the cows, we also began dreaming of a vacation.  We had each been able to get away on occasion...alone...but not together, and we were ready for that to change!

We are very thankful to our current employers, who saw how important this was to us, and who were willing to give us some extended time off so soon after we began working for them!

All that said, I'm excited to recap our vacation for whoever would like to follow along!  I posted on Instagram and Face Book along the way, but didn't give a lot of details.  I'll warn you up front...the posts will be picture heavy, but it's what I do!  I snap away.  After all, I wouldn't want to forget anything!

Here's the first weekend...

We left home on Saturday morning March 23.  I had filled up the gas tank the night before on my way home from work, so we started with just ten miles on the trip odometer.  (We typically drive older cars and run them until they die, so none of our current vehicles were trip worthy.  We found this car at an auction last fall and bought it with this trip in mind.  It's fourteen years old, but had only 45,000 miles on it when we bought it.  An older man was the sole owner, and he had kept it spotlessly clean and had it serviced regularly and garage kept.) The mileage will look a lot different when we get home!

About an hour from home, we hit a traffic jam.  A stand still, get out of your car and walk around traffic jam that delayed us about an hour.  There was an accident on the highway a mile or so in front of us.  We never heard if anyone was badly injured, but we could clearly see where it had happened after traffic began moving again.

Thankfully (for more than just us!)  it was the only accident we encountered on the entire trip!

Our first destination was to my sister and brother in law's home in Kimball, West Virginia.  They are location coordinators for SWAP (Sharing With Appalachian People) which is under the umbrella of MCC (Mennonite Central Committee)  It's a great organization, if you want to check it out!

One of my favorite things on this trip was seeing how the landscape changed from state to state...even from mile to mile!  This is somewhere between here and there, either in Virginia or West Virginia...

It was supposed to be about an eight hour trip, but it took us ten hours due to the accident and a leisurely lunch stop.  We still had some daylight left when we passed Pinnacle Rock along Route 52, so we stopped for a quick hike to the top.  It's not a long or difficult hike...but it's worth the view!  The Appalachian Mountains are quite different from the Rockies, which I'll get to later...but beautiful just the same...

On Sunday afternoon, Lee and Peg took us hiking at Brush Creek Falls.

Aren't the water falls beautiful?  That's a 33' drop, in case you were wondering.  While we were there, a couple of young people took the plunge.  They looked pretty cold when they got out of the water!

The first waterfalls were close to the beginning of the trail, but there was a second falls about 1 1/2 miles further along the trail.  It was a beautiful day, and we had no cows to milk...so on we went...

And this...THIS...almost got us off to a really crummy start on our vacation.  I slipped and my phone ended up IN. THE. WATER.  Totally submerged in about two feet of water.

Jim was closest to it, and he grabbed it as fast as he could.  I thought it was all over.  I mean really...we are so attached to and dependent on our phones!!  How were we going to travel halfway across the country for two weeks with no means of communication and no internet access??  Talk about a first world problem.

I am so very thankful to say, that after the screen went blank for about ten minutes (and me panicking) my phone came back to life with no apparent permanent side affects!  My case is mostly made of rubber, and I think that's what saved it.  I don't know.  But ANYWAY...we were fine.  Sigh.

Thanks for following along on the first weekend of our getaway.  More to come in the next few days...