Missouri... Mizory... Mizery... Misery

I don’t know what kind of spell Missouri cast over us, but for some reason as hard as I think I cannot recall anything super interesting happening the first couple days that we were there. We woke up on the fifth of September with the intention of documenting what had already happened so far on our trip. You know, get the journals written, the photos compiled, the videos edited, and of course, the blogs written. But as you will all have noticed at this point, I only posted one blog that day, and that blog was as short as could be seeing as the subject matter was Kansas. As far as productivity was going for that day we were down near zero.

“Still something must have happened” you say, and to that I nod my head a bit and try my best to recall what we did with all the time that we had that day. Here is a real streamlined approach to it (because wasting words on doing nothing seems like such a lousy thing to do, of course I suppose that is exactly what I’m doing now, how many words have I shoved in this parenthetical statement already? Okay, maybe wasting words on nothing is more up my alleyway after all).

1.         Wake up and I make the morning oatmeal out on the front porch after Katt leaves for work. (Morning oatmeal is pretty much a sweeter rendition of evening beans, for this particular oatmeal I accidentally overloaded on the amount of molasses that I included, something that I have made sure to avoid since)
2.          Sit around and try to get some work done on social media outlets while trying to ignore the rising heat and humidity.
3.         Move around to the back side of the building to get some shade and snack on some food.
4.         Realize that we really are getting nothing done plus we can’t get access to the wifi at the back of the building so maybe we should go see if we can find the Missouri river.
5.         Wander aimlessly through town with a vague idea of the direction we should be going.
6.         Run into a random wall of trees in the middle of town and try and make our way through the brush eventually finding ourselves in a heavily wooded patch of land right in the middle of the city, eventually get out and back to the road.
7.         Decide to go back and get the cars and drive to the river.
8.         Get waylaid by stumbling across a whole bunch of Monarch Butterfly Chrysalises.
9.         Run into Katt when she gets home, find out we can check out the pool and community center there at the apartment complex
10.       Check out the pool and community center at the apartment complex
11.        Do a tiny bit of writing.
12.        Have a small little party to celebrate my birthday as we slip into September 6^th

Wow, that is quite a few words I wasted on nothing. And that was even with breaking it down to bullet points. Anyway, my birthday, September 6^th, came in with everyone waking up late and then once everyone was awake Katt treated us all to my birthday lunch. It was at a popular Kansas City chain restaurant called 54^th Street Pub and Eatery. The sandwiches there were beyond delicious, and the local beer I tried was delicious—very smooth, slight hint of fruit, and only a bit of bitterness on the finish. Once again, major shout-out to Katt for being the best hostess ever.

After hanging out for a bit longer we got in our cars and drove a few hundred miles to Jefferson City where we met up with Aaron, an old roommate of Tweedy’s and Eric’s (since I had hung around those two constantly I knew him as well). He offered us a floor to crash on in a room that had enough air conditioning to keep us at a decent temperature to fall asleep at—a rare thing to find in the state of misery… I mean Missouri. Our time at Aaron’s only extended through the night, then we were up and on the road again the next day on the search to find a cave.

Missouri is known for being the cave state and so we were hoping to find some cave that did not have any of the tourist walks in it, so that we could just go spelunking in it without anyone constantly staring over our shoulders, unfortunately that was not what ended up happening. We found Meramec Caverns on the map and so decided to head towards that cave since it also appeared to be near a state park. Our reasoning was even if Meramec Caverns was a tourist trap then at least we could wander through the state park and perhaps find a cave that was free of the irritating tour guides and regulations and planned routes through easily accessible segments of cave.

We reached the outskirts of Meramec and Eric and Tweedy had the keen desire to rinse off beforehand because they had been traveling through the land of endless humid heat in a car that had no air conditioning (personally I felt great, which will surprise my family since they all think my car has a horrible air conditioning system—turns out that all you have to do for it to work at 100% is fill the car with a whole bunch of stuff and drive through states with high humidity). So we stopped off at a river and swam around for a bit before going on to the cave entrance.

Meramec Caverns was indeed a tourist trap, and the price for a single adult was high above what we agreed to turn down ($15 had been our agreed maximum, the price was $23). We tried haggling with the tour guide behind the counter along with trying to figure out caves that we could go into without paying a fee. He mentioned a few places (actually he mentioned ten different locations, though didn’t include any directions to any of them) along with some encyclopedic type knowledge about the caves and types of caves in the state of Missouri. Though despite all of his knowledge we ended up skipping finding a cave to go spelunking in and instead headed on to a nearby state park called Elephant Rock.

To sum up Elephant Rock—it looks like a little bit of Colorado in the middle of Misery, I mean Missouri.

We hiked all over the rocks and even all the way to the opposite side of the park while we were in search of one of Jesse James’ hideouts that one of the people there told us about. He was going to give us very specific directions, but Tweedy didn’t want to hear them for some reason. Because of that we never found his old hideout, but we did find two old granite quarries that had since filled with water. If it hadn’t been sitting water we probably would have jumped in.

We stayed there until the sun dipped down below the horizon, even made some food at one of the park benches, and then we were on the road for Illinois.

For video check out these channels on YouTube: Eat2Pigs and itawtidid