Roadtrip to NYC: Colorado Springs, CO to Davenport, IA
940 miles, via Kansas City, MO. Time spent: 16 hours on the road. This is our longest day, beating out the 12.5 hours and 840 miles from the day before. We spend a full day (well, 26 hours) in Davenport to play with one of Joel's friends.
Day 3 brings a generous send-off from Booker and family in Colorado Springs. A more direct route would have had us skipping Colorado entirely (Elko, NV to Cheyenne, WY is 666 miles, then Cheynne, WY to Davenport, IA is only 795 miles), but we couldn't resist the opportunity to visit Booker and confirm the rumors of the $250,000 mansions available in Colorado. Plus, Denver is pretty cool. The additional 323 miles were well worth it-- plus, instead of boring our butts off in Nebraska, we got to bore our butts off in Kansas, which at least has a Super Walmart every 60 miles or so.
This was our longest day-- 3pm (Mountain time) to 7am (Central time) and had us pulling through Kansas City about midnight. The Walmart every 60 miles provide extremely useful, as an encounter with a very polite Colorado State Trooper for 73mph in a 65mph left us off with a warning **phew** and notice that one of the headlights in Joel's 2003 VW GTI was out. Finding a VW headlight (H7) in middle America isn't easy, but $20 later, Walmart saved us. Kansas City actually looked surprisingly nice for a metropolis in the midwest, although our brief glimpses through the very well-run Kansas State Turnpike between Topeka and KC and out the windows in KC itself were probably rather limited. The 120 or so miles through Missouri sucked as construction and ridiculous humidity made us very uncomfortable. Add in the dose of redneck and we were... very happy to be out of Missouri.
To be fair, St. Louis is supposed to be nice, but that's the eastern edge of Missouri, and we were on the western edge. We were happy to enter Iowa, and found that Des Moines is about as small as expected population-wise, but very spread-out. It had somewhere around 15 freeway exists off of I-25 and I-80, which gave the impression that it probably encompassed as much land as half of Los Angeles. Sunrise was somewhere between Des Moines and Davenport, where we saw lots of green cornfields and other lovely sights. Compared to the desolation in Utah and Wyoming, this was almost nice!
7am arrival in Davenport marked our only navigational error of the entire trip-- we blame Stephanie for bad directions onto I-74-- and a crossing of the Mississippi River a day early. Oops.
We turned around, made it into Davenport, said hi to Stephanie and her parents, then waited while she collected her husband and we went off to breakfast. A few hours' sleep was all that separated the end of one day from the start of the next, then we met up with more of Stephanie's friends to go go-karting and lasertag at "Michael's Sports World", then some pretty decent pizza (ever had a reuben pizza? it's good!) and then a visit to another friend's place and his incredible collection of terrariums and fishtanks. We watched a DVD somewhere in there before collapsing asleep...
