We left West Lafayette around 8:30 Saturday morning. I had really wanted to take a picture of all of us in front of our beloved Bainbridge house before we departed, but it was raining pretty hard so the best I got was the kids packed into the van.
Abraham made it about an hour, but then threw up in the car a couple times before we made it to Great Grandpa's house in Tell City. He must have had a stomach bug, because he had no appetite and spent the entire evening dozing on the couch. He felt better the next day, and we spent the Sabbath visiting with family.
We left for the second leg of our journey bright and early Monday morning. We stopped for a potty break at a neat old mansion called White Haven in Kentucky.
Just before lunch time, the tread tore off one of our tires. Miraculously, the tire didn't blow and we were able to drive another 1.8 miles into Poplar Bluff, Missouri to get it fixed. It took about 5 hours to replace 1 stud, 3 lug nuts and all four tires. We bided our time eating lunch at Taco Bell, climbing on the play place at McDonalds, getting ice cream and some other snacks at Kroger, and watching the tv at the tire shop.
Because of our long delay, we didn't make it to Mansfield, Missouri in time for me to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum, which I had been saving up for and looking forward to for months. I could at least see the house from the side of the road, which was something anyway, and the drive through the Ozarks was lovely.
We had a hard time finding a place to eat that evening, and ended up in a smokey truck stop diner.
Having to keep on schedule, we drove into the night and didn't arrive at our hotel in Joplin, Missouri until nearly midnight.
Tuesday morning we got going a little slower, but were still on the road by 10:00 am.
We had lunch at Panera Bread in Oklahoma City.
We crossed into Texas mid afternoon and it looks just as big as they boast. Everyone was getting restless, so we took a break at an impressive rest stop that included a nice playground.
We pulled in to Amarillo, Texas about 7:00 pm and ate dinner at the Cracker Barrel that was next door to the hotel. We got a good start Wednesday morning and drove the last four hours to Albuquerque with no problems. The highway closely follows old Route 66. We needed to stop for gas at one point and the only option was a small station that looked like it had probably been there since the heyday of the old road.
We arrived at our rental house exactly at 12:30 pm. It is the perfect place for us to spend our first month here, adjusting to a new city and looking for a home.
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