Trip Review: My One day trip to Springfield.... and why Humansville was settled by Martians

Okay,

So yesterday I woke up feeling less than stellar with my knee hurting and the pain pills making me woozy and nauseous. (which is pretty serious when you consider that woozy and nauseous are almost the same exact thing!) But, not wanting my lovely Bride to make the trip to Springfield alone, I saddled up the front passenger seat, propped my leg up on a hugely inappropriately HUGE pillow and away we rode...

The trip to Springfield has gotten significantly better over the years as they've gradually widened "deadly" 13 Highway. The other big change in driving the three miles South from Kansas City is the addition of dead armadillos. Why, when I was a kid, we didn't have armadillos in Missouri...we had to walk miles, barefoot in the snow, just to import armadillos from Arkansas...yeah, we had it rough back then!

So, the drive was uneventful, other than the random bouts of almost pukedom that swept over me as we approached various towns... (of course, I've always felt that way when approaching Humansville!) HA! Just kidding denizens of Humansville! (although with a name like that, can't you almost see space people coming to our planet and trying to blend in by naming their settlement "HUMANSVILLE???" Weird...) Of course, that brings to mind businesses like "Citizens Bank..." Who else would be using it???
It's not called "Dog Bank" is it? Dopey name.

So, we get to Springfield and bank a left and head towards my favorite place on the planet "STRAFFORD, MISSOURI!" To where Sherry's parent's have land just a stones throw (If you can throw a quarter of a mile and not accidentally hit Tim Ewing's house) from where I was born and raised. Okay, I wasn't born there, I was born in a hospital, but I did spend my first 24 years there trying to avoid being hit by thrown stones.

Had a nice visit with Sherry's folks, although still feeling a tad pukey. (I think the medication I was on coupled with the extreme heat of the past few days, had a LOT to do with it).

Went to my Mom's abode and had a nice visit with her too... She was in a good mood and happy to see us so we visited for quite a while. We were supposed to meet my Dad, but our schedules got crossed up, so we drove through town past the Minor League Cardinals home, Hammon's Field, so that Jared could see it up close. We drove through the Square, which I hadn't been through in close to 20 years or so... It's rebounding, but still looks remarkably the same for the most part.

Being the family of diverse tastes that we are, we could not decide on what food to "grab" on our way out of town. Sherry and I had "Shanghai Inn" in mind for Cashew Chicken... Jared wanted a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut, and Dustin wanted Taco Bell. So we made the stops and then stopped for Gas (the other kind, not the stuff we picked up at Taco Bell) and then hit the road around 6:30. Thanks to the miraculous healing powers of Cashew Chicken, I started feeling better and actually slept part of the way home.

The boys argued a bit and I yelled at them some and we looked for deer, but spotted mostly cows and dead armadillos along the way. Ah, the one day road trip to Springfield....

David