Texas Bound!
This morning we left very early and started our drive to Texas! We are going down to Harker Heights to visit Jeremy and D’Neill and their family (Angela’s Brother). It’s about a 17 hour drive down, but we decided to make some stops along the way and have some fun!
Our first stop was in St. Louis. We had never been to the top of the Gateway Arch before, so we decided it was about time. It was a really cool experience…
We were wondering how the elevators worked in the thing since it is an arch, and it turns out it is an 8 car cog tram that slowly makes it’s way up. You sit in these little egg-shaped cars that are very small and could be very crazy if you are claustrophobic! 🙂 As you make your way up, the car tilts, and then swings which makes it like a bumpy ferris wheel. It was a little nerve racking but fun. 🙂 When we got to the top, the views were amazing! The day could not have been more perfect and you could see all around (the city on one side, and the Mississippi River on the other.
The boys particularly loved it! Kirstyn kept making comments about the Percy Jackson books because one of the events took place in the arch! 🙂 There’s quite a bit of history in the city and we were able to talk to the kids about some of it (before they glassed over and got bored). In the picture above, the courthouse with the green dome roof was where the Dred Scott case was argued back in 1857. Pretty cool!
After coming down from the top of the arch, we visited the Museum of Westward Expansion in the basement area of the arch. It was pretty funny… They had a large wall of pictures and descriptions of the Lewis and Clark adventure and there were many pictures of the Salmon River Valley, etc. The people there were very excited to tell us all about it. That is until they found out Angela was from that region and may have known more about the area than they did. 🙂
We wandered around the beautiful grounds (nice for December – in the 50’s) got our family picture taken by a passer-by, and then headed back to the car.
We then drove over to the St. Louis Temple and spent a few minutes there admiring the building. It is hard to believe that it has been 14 years since the open house we attended before its dedication! 😐
We then were off to cross the state of Missouri to Joplin, down into Oklahoma (which I had never been to before) and then on to Texas. We were very interested in stopping in Jopin, because that is where the F5 tornado came through last summer, destroying a bunch of the town, and killing a bunch of people. When we pulled in, we initially couldn’t tell anything had happened until we drove a little north of the city to where our church building “had been.” When we arrived in the area, we couldn’t believe what we saw. Although it had been 6 months from the tornado incident, there was still a huge amount of devastation. An area of about a mile wide (north and south) and as far as you could see (east and west) was totally trashed! All the trees were completely stripped and all that were left were the trunks. Homes were completely destroyed, the high school was ripped to shreds, and there were places that houses had once stood that were now just empty plots of dirt with not even a single blade of grass. The people had started to rebuild so there were some telephone poles up and some power lines, but they have a ways to go. The place where the church building stood is now a barren plot of ground and there is no evidence that a building was even there. 🙁
From what what we could tell, the two pictures above were taken where the church once stood). The top one (we think) was taken right on the church grounds. You can see what happened to the high school! Pictures don’t really express the amount of damage and it was a very humbling experience to drive and walk around the place. To see where entire parking lots were ripped up and lamp posts were ripped off their bases was just amazing. The strange thing is that when you got to the edge of the damage, the roofs all looked new, but the trees were fine and there was no additional damage. It was just a mile or so wide area that was carved out of the earth. Living in Illinois, we hear the tornado warning sirens all the time, and there have been a couple of tornadoes come close, but nothing like this.
It was starting to get dark, so we jumped back in the van and headed into Oklahoma, where we are now spending the night in a small town just southeast of Tulsa. Tomorrow we’ll be up and on the road early so we can get to Texas and relax!
