From somewhere in Missouri…

Following yesterday’s cloud theme, this is how we began the day. It was the last we saw of bright light during an otherwise dreary drive. The news here is full of weather stories and their impact on the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, but we haven’t seen anything worth mentioning since we emerged from the snow around London yesterday.

For the first couple of hours today our route took  us along secondary highways, though wooded areas and flat farmland. Later in the day, back on expressways, we moved into the rolling hills of the Ozarks which Wikipedia tells me are not really mountains but “a high and deeply dissected plateau.” They appeared to be mountains similar to the Appalachians at first, but then became rolling hills. Cuts for the highway revealed what looked like soft, layered rock.

Of minor interest: The Purgatory Golf Club. Why? Perhaps adjacent to Purgatory, Indiana–which would raise it’s own questions. But no such place exists. Its name is all its own, and its website claims it’s “more heaven than hell”.

 

St. Louis, Missouri, the Gateway City, so named because it was the Gateway to the western territories. The Gateway Arch is impressive, even from the expressway. We took a wrong turn and found ourselves briefly in the city itself, driving past Busch Stadium–a neat old structure. The St. Louis Cardinals were (are?) my brother Rod’s favourite baseball team because they had the first black major league player.

We stopped for gas at a truck stop in the Ozarks and OH MY GOD. There, on a television hanging between the potato chips and the country music CDs, was Rob Ford, frothing at the mouth. The commentator — on Fox News — was just wrapping up today’s story (whatever it was) with the news–no longer surprising, alas–that more than a third of Torontonians still support him. Is this better or worse for our international image than the fact that we’re dead last in the OECD for environmental policy? Sexier, obviously.

Busch Stadium

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