Transitions Part 3: A 1700 Mile Adventure

Well, as I said in yesterday’s post, we left Michigan on Wednesday, August 1, and spent the night in a motel in Indiana. That is literally all the time we spent in Indiana, as the motel was just inside the border, and the next morning, within maybe 45 minutes, we were crossing into Illinois.

Before we went to bed, though, I received an email from my wonderful cousin Anne, telling me that she had booked us a room in St. Louis, MO, which was our next destination. She said it was a gift from her, since we were meeting her there to spend the day together! What a nice thing for her to do, and one of the bright spots for the day to come! My husband had originally booked us into a room on the Illinois side of the border to St. Louis, because it was much less expensive, and we were trying to keep our costs down, so I called and had him cancel that room for me. 🙂

Thursday morning, I KNEW I had plenty of gas to get to St. Louis. And I still think I would have had enough, if we had not been routed off the freeway, along with all the hundreds of other travelers, due to a huge accident involving a mega bus in Litchfild, Illinois. For well over two hours, we were stuck in two-mile per hour traffic, when we were moving at all.

This was my view for the next two hours or so . . .

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Finally, we were past the HUGE section of closed freeway, and allowed to get back onto the freeway, but then I realized that my "you are about to run out of gas" light had just come on, so it was time to find a gas station, one that would still permit me to get back to the freeway without becoming lost (because I am, as my husband says, geographically challenged!). So, we did find a gas station, pulled in, and I got out to pump the gas. Now, as you could probably tell from the photo above, it had been threatening rain for a while. Well, just after I paid at the pump and got ready to fill the tank, the clouds let loose, and the deluge began. I tried to quickly set the pump to auto-fill and get back in the minivan until it was done, but there was no time. In that minute before getting back in, I was literally soaked to the skin. That’s how hard it was raining. And then, the power at the gas station went off. Not for long, but just long enough that it cut off my transaction. Because of that, the pump did not print my receipt, and I was NOT going to go, in the rain, to the building to see if they could print one. I just hoped for the best and checked for the transaction on my bank website the next day so I could enter it. Because the power went off, I didn’t get a fill up, I got a little over half a tank. I just decided to go with that and hope it was enough, or if not, that we’d outrun the rain before needing more gas, lol!

This is what I looked like after getting soaked to the skin . . .

And even though it was August, we had to turn the heat on in the minivan, all the way up, with the fan going, because I was absolutely freezing! Eventually, we made it to St. Louis, and found the hotel Anne had booked us into. Oh, my, did that hotel make up for the day we’d had! It was the Hampton Inn by the airport, and it was the nicest room I’d ever stayed in!

Surprisingly, I quickly discovered when we checked in that they had no guest laundry facilities! I changed into dry clothes (because yes, I had gotten so soaked that everything I was wearing was still quite wet, good thing my minivan doesn’t have cloth seats!), and we went in search of a laundry-mat. We never found one, so we gave up and went back to the room. By then I was too tired to go out to get supper, so we ate the shelf stable microwave meals I had bought (just in case!) before we left Pt. Huron. They were surprisingly not too bad! We slept pretty well that night . . . we were all tired! 🙂

Tomorrow, our day in St. Louis with my fabulous cousin Anne!

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