Tales Of The Traveling Tennessee Tina: Route 66-Day Two

The amazing thing about Route 66 is that is conveniently located right beside of the highway, so if you want to plan out and pinpoint certain things that you want to see but not drive on a two lane road with a lower speed limit that dead ends at random spots then it is totally feasible and that is what we did for the majority of our trip. Route 66 literally runs along side of the highway, you can see it from your comfortable 75 miles per hour lane and like I said Andy was busy working pretty much the entire time and we were on a time limit to get to California. If you wanted to get really involved in Route 66 then you could spend weeks discovering all of the buried treasure along that stretch of road. Day two was a bright and early morning, which is always the case in camping, especially if it is hot outside but we were blessed with nice weather for the most part along the way. Day two begins and we trek through the last of Illinois and said our goodbyes to the state that we resided in for less than a calender year. On came Missouri, home of the St. Lois Arch, the Gateway to the West. Home of the beautiful seven story Meramec Cavers which supposedly was a hide out for American outlaws Frank and Jesse James.It is also home of the beautiful Ozark Mountains, which hopefully one day in my travels I will get to explore. Not this time though, there just simply wasn't enough time.

As I leaned out the window taking pictures of the arch as it greeted me to the west the sense of adventure tightened in my veins. There is a uneasy amount of excitement as you realize you are going to see things you have never seen, eat things you have never tasted and meet people you may otherwise might have never known, this is how I felt on the beginning of day two. As far west as I have ever been was Chicago, although I am no stranger to the fun of traveling on the road. Somewhere along the way close to Meramec Caverns, which was our next destination Andy saw a couple of teepees to our right on Route 66 with a big sign that read "BUFFALO JERKY". This of course was reason to stop, as we walked up on the cute little tourist trap with no real authentic Indians we were greeted at the door by a man who said there would be a two dollar charge per person if we didn't purchase anything. This made me laugh at how well he was doing at ripping Route 66 travelers off to come into his hut to buy over priced Indian paraphernalia. We walked in and I found the most beautiful peace pipe made out of a deer hoof and some wood. I may have bought it even though there was poor little innocent deer foot on it, but the guy was asking $50.00, which I just found to be ridiculous. Andy did however buy two packages of homemade so called Buffalo jerky, which could have been anything I suppose but it was pretty tasty and cost ten dollars a package. Wowza! Anyway it was a cute stop and the jerky made an excellent midnight snack beside of the fire. We arrived to Meramec Caverns with the heat on our back and Andy took to his laptop again to finish work as I set up the tent. It was a very, very nice campground, and probably my favorite of the entire trip. It was super secluded, we were surrounded by tree's and although you could hear other campers they couldn't be seen. We were facing the Meramec River, and after I refreshed at the shower houses that they offered I came back and cooked us a delicious cheeseburger on our new Safari Chef grill and we kicked back with an amazing fire on an amazing night with a sky full of the brightest stars that we had seen in a long time. We wanted to get an early start for the next day which included an early morning tour of the caverns and then on the road again. Below I will share with you a few of the pictures of our stay at Meramec Caverns.