On our way

This morning we woke up in Colby, KS, about 1600 miles into our summer swing across the western United States. With Colorado being our first ‘real destination’, we’ve just been pounding out the miles so far.

From the highway, we only get a glimpse of the country we pass through, but I find it curious that a great deal I remember about the states came from 5th grade. Back in the day, we had to learn the names of the states and their capital cities. We also learned the various states’ history, economics, and development. Absent what I learned in Ledgeview Elementary School, these are a few of the interesting observations from the front seat of our SUV.

Georgia

Forsyth, Georgia. We spent our first night in this small town just north of Macon, Georgia. Forsyth has our vote for Smalltown, USA. The center of the town is what you’d expect with shops and cafes. Outside of Main Street, the roads are lined with beautiful trees. They claim the oldest Magnolia tree in the state of Georgia.

South of Atlanta, we passed a very large solar farm that looked to be nearing construction completion. It ran along I-75 for close to a mile and stretched east into the hills. We never thought of Georgia as a location for solar energy, but it IS just north of Florida, the Sunshine State. We’re happy to see solar expanding.

It was late in the afternoon, and we were getting tired as we left western Tennessee and entered the tip of Kentucky. Here we passed through Paducah, Kentucky – a place I know of, but likely only from 5th grade. Pasucah is a city I’ve never really thought of traveling past. Sitting at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, I can see that Paducah would have been an important city in the 1800s. And suddenly it was in our rearview mirror.

Here Comes the Rain

Just east of St Louis, Missouri the skies darkened, the temperature dropped and we were entertained by distant, long strokes of lightning from high clouds. The strobe lightning led the front of a rainstorm as we headed west along I-64. Then, suddenly the rains came. Heavy, dense, dark, pounding rain. We slowed to 40 MPH with flashers on, our wipers could barely keep up.

After about 15 minutes of white knuckle driving, we finally drove out of the rain. It was gone nearly as fast as it had initially attacked us. From well outside St Louis, we caught a distant view of the 630 ft St Louis arch. If it hadn’t been raining so hard, we might have detoured to get closer. After all, it is “Missouri’s tallest accessible building, the world’s tallest arch and the tallest manmade monument in the Western Hemisphere“, at least that’s according to Wikipedia.