National Park Roadtrip Day 2: July 4.2019

This year for the fourth of July I spent my day on the road getting to see what makes this country so great, it's land and it's people....and a little bit of fireworks. After spending the night in St. Louis, we woke up and hit the road.  We were hoping to get to see the arch up close, but the holiday gave us some different plans.  Our hotel was right on the route of a parade, and there was also a festival underneath the arch.  We had to leave town super early or we would have risked getting stuck in town until the afternoon.  For this reason, we had to take in the arch from the distance.  I had been up the arch before, so it wasn't as big a loss as it could have been. My grandparents didn't get to go up, but neither of them are too fond of heights and buildings that sway at the top.  Getting out of the city was an event for sure.  We had to leave the hotel around seven in the morning to get our car out of the garage, but it turned out that just getting the car out was the easy part.  Getting out stuff from the lobby of the downtown hotel into the vehicle took us about half an hour despite the distance of one city block.  We finally got loaded and on the road after we walked our stuff to the car.  For emphasis here I should add that this was the luggage and backpacks of five people for a ten day roadtrip. We looked like pack mules making our way down that parade route sidewalk.  

After getting out of the city, we began making our way to our first stop in Colorado Springs.  The ride, while uneventful and not particularly exciting, was beautiful.  One thing that I noticed on the trip overall was how beautiful even the drives were.  The drive through Kansas, while unremarkable, was somehow beautiful in it's simplicity and was also exactly what I wanted Kansas to be, all the way down to the wizard of oz souvenirs at the gas stations.  The cities were few and far between and the farm fields were bountiful.  As we passed into Colorado around sunset, we were able to see fireworks alongside the road and at the rest stop that we stopped at as we were coming into the state.  These were individuals doing this and they were actually good fireworks, ones that in my town in Ohio you let off and the police are getting called.  I speak from experience on this matter, but that is a different story for a different day.  We arrived at our hotel in Colorado Springs just in time to roll into bed, exhausted and looking forward to our first official day of sightseeing in the first city on our trip.  

 
    Middle America looked exactly how I wanted it to look....beautiful in it's untouched simplicity.  and sometimes in it's abandoned diners and hotels and roadside dinosaurs.