May 17-May23: Evansville, Missouri, and the long haul West

Well the first thing we did before leaving Virginia was to go visit the Great Falls. This is a nice little waterfall mere minutes from our house that we had wanted to visit since we moved in nearly 3 years previous. I swore that we would not leave Virginia without seeing it, so that was our first stop.



Next we drove straight through to Evansville. Nothing notable here other than I nearly destroyed both of our cars suspensions. At about 11 hours of driving we hit some construction and I mistook a pothole ridden gutter lane for the actual road. Jen claims one of her rims got a little bent up.

After a nice visit with the Parentals, we drove straight on to Independence, MO. Here we stopped by my Uncle Mike and aunt Joann's place and had a nice visit. We probably should come back at some point and visit Branson and all the other wild country attractions.



Through Oklahoma we found a strange sign saying "Don't drive through the smoke". We're thinking...what smoke? Apparently there was a big forest fire many years ago that caused a huge pileup. So now they have those signs everywhere just in case. That's just silly.

From there we had to spend a night in Albuquerque, NM. And finally we arrived at Jen's mom's place outside of LA.

Props to Subway for having $5 footlong subs. With that and a couple free cups of water we're definitely keeping our budget on track.