RV Day 4
Friday, April 9
So we wake today in the winery’s parking lot to a beautiful day! We are 90 minutes from St Louis. We find a Cracker Barrel Restaurant for breakfast and pig out on an ungodly amount of food including eggs and bacon, hash brown casserole, biscuits and gravy and even Catfish and Grits! I should be walking this off, but instead we will ‘drive’ it off, LOL
As we drive towards St Louis, Elee researches some locations to photograph the Gateway Arch from. Because we’re driving a behemoth RV, we can’t just go in blind. So we find a fun park that looks across the river at the arch and our cameras snuggle up to us and start purring! We even ham it up for an online camera mounted there and take note of the website to look these pics up on later!
Then we drive out and find our way across the mighty Mississippi River to the side the Arch is on. An interesting note here, all my life I always thought the Arch spanned the river. I find out that it doesn’t. But we manage to find a place near it to park and we wander about the area and make our cameras extremely happy!
There is an elevator Tram that takes you to the top of the Arch, but sadly we find out you have to book it in advance and more so now because of Covid. So we check but it is sold out. We enjoy the area and take lots of photos and then we get back into the RV and head west. We drive across the State of Missouri in about 4 hours. We don’t look for much to do in Missouri because we want to get back on our time schedule and have extra time to spend in Colorado and Utah.
About halfway across Missouri, I need a break from concentrating on the diving and Elee finds me a winery to stop at. So at Les Beaujolais Winery and Vineyard, we each get a tasting flight of 4 wines each. The total consumption is about one glass of wine each. I also get a squeegee out and scrub the bugs off the huge windshield! Several patrons on the patio of the winery watch me, and as we pass by them, I tell one of them, “I feel like a kid again playing with my bug collection!” So we enjoy our Wine Flights and kibitz with a friendly local couple and their dog!
We have a book at home entitled, “1000 Places to Visit Before You Die”. In it, there is a BBQ joint, Arthur Bryant’s, in Kansas City that is one of the places. So, of course we have to go there! It turns out to be in Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas. But that’s ok, it’s still Kansas City! who would have thought that a City would span into two states? Same with St Louis, by the way, it is in both Illinois and Missouri. The restaurant is kind of a dive in a not so good part of town. You get in line and order the food in the back by the kitchens. Then you can sit at flimsy card tables with rickety chairs and eat. The place is one that we normally would not eat at when you see the place.
Arthur Bryant’s, everyone should look it up if you’re ever in Kansas City! It turns out to be is a very seedy part of the city but we stop anyways! The food is some of the best BBQ we have ever had and we get loads of Baby Back Ribs and a pound of Brisket which turns out to be 2 pounds because it is the end of their night and the food must go! We have a fridge in the RV and we take the rest to go!
Leaving the restaurant, we find a gas station and I partially fill the RV’s tank. The attendant wishes me a safe journey and tells me not to get robbed. Wow, that was his nice way of telling me we don’t belong in this part of town! So I get rolling and set the navigation to our destination for the night, a Church parking lot 25 miles away. We get there and set up the RV on our own power (No hook ups here). It seems to be a quiet neighborhood and the reviews on the place are good (Harvest Hosts).
After driving all day, I settle down with a glass of wine to write this post. We hear the pitter patter of rain on the roof and the RV will get washed once again.
Good night and see you in the morning!
Around the World in 80 Trips (Or Less) 
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