Home in Missouri...

After three solid days of flat landscape, an attractive but featureless and hopelessly unphotogenic landscape, it was a welcome relief to find the view out the truck window subtly changing. The air became warmer, the trees more frequent and taller, and the ground became greener and started to roll. We crossed Iowa on the way southwards, and found our first skyscraper in the last 2,000 miles. It came as a visual shock, a sharp sensation that man had intruded himself onto the prairie. It was the city of Omaha.














Even the nature of the traffic changed dramatically, as the huge combines and trucks carrying oversized grain storage units disappeared and were replaced by the ordinary ebb and flow of semi-trailers.

We crossed Iowa quickly and entered Missouri, where it felt entirely different...a land more gentle, but somehow calmer and to me more recognizable from my Ontario roots.

The next day was grey and dismally cold. The Missouri habit of changeability had struck, and lowered the 70F sunshine to 49F murk. But still, as you can see from the scenery on the way to Rick's cousin Carol's house, Missouri is anything but flat.

It's good to be with family again. We got a wonderful lunch, a very hot shower and washed our little bag of laundry. We sat in the family sun room and chatted about the trip, the family, the harvest this year....all the ordinary stuff of family life, and it felt warm and comforting. I love the sun room that Ron and Carol added to their house a few year's back. So I took a picture of it. Ron and Carol are on the left and Aunt Thelma is on the right. Aunt Thelma turned 91 this year. You'd never know it!

Today is Aunt Betty's birthday bash at Ron and Carol's. She turns 91 too. We have to get ready and will fill you all in later, after we get back. We went to check in with Aunt Betty yesterday at her apartment in Saint Joe. We took her to supper but she drove us. Afterwards we did a tour of the area where her grand-dad had lived in an old and interesting area of the city. Aunt Betty doesn't think too much of it, as to her the area has become run down and neglected. But we could imagine it all and her reminiscences created for us a living tour of what life used to be like in old Saint Joe...