Day 9: Six States in the Longest Day

Plotting our course from the Northern states through the Midwest, angling down to Alabama, we were going to be passing a whole bunch of states. Well, we fell into compulsive state-collecting, as geeky homeschool parents are wont to do, and snaked our route to hit as many corners of passing states as possible. (We are collecting state license plates too--required American road trip activity!)

It was fun--but resulted in the Day That Would Never End. Six states in one day: South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri.

Beautiful Minnesota rest area.

Stretching tired road trip bodies at a playground. I can't even remember in what state.

This was a day of driving, so nothing more to show you. But we kept on enjoying our Ralph Moody audio book, and noting the changing scenery as we moved from one part of the US to another, and Sunny was collecting bits of nature from every state we passed through, and Smiley decided his goal would be to pee in every state we passed through, and it was a long day of driving but we still had fun.

We stopped for the night at another Walmart, this time in Kansas City. That was the night of the crazy yelling neighbors, and the need to move the trailer elsewhere in the parking lot in the middle of the night. It was not a great night's sleep for the grownups, and this was probably the psychological low point of the whole trip (for the adults in charge). It was at this point that, looking at the map and planning ahead, we decided to skip some of the last things we had debated doing and get to AL one day ahead of schedule. 

We may have been tired, but we were still up for making the most of the time we had left!