Day 1and 2

Well.. The journey begins. Stick with us on this blog thing because this will be the first time either of us have used anything like this.

Sunday July 6th:
Day 1: After squeezing all of our worldly possesions into Katie's mazda 3 trunk and back seat, we were on schedule. (special thanks to Sam, Lauran's sister, for helping us pack the car) We left St. Charles, Mo at our planned time of departure at 2:00pm on the dot. We took note of the odometer and off we went. We were about half way to our destination for the night (Kansas City) when we hit our first road block (traffic). There was a horrible accident on highway 70 in Kingdom City and the traffic was at stand still. After inching along for a half hour, we decided after much planning and debating, that we would take our first adventure and follow the rest of the cars, and take the off road route and take a quick right through the ditch to get us to the side road. IF this wasn't bad enough, we then went about 30 miles on the side road, until we hit another road block and we were forced yet again to follow the other cars (huge SUVs and Jeeps) and slowly enter back onto the highway on the nicely paved strip of grass. After the slight off roading adventure the rest of drive to KC was uneventful. We made it to KC and stayed with our friend Bryan and his roommates. Bryan grilled us a delicious dinner and we watched the movie Semi Pro.

Day 2: Monday July 7

We left Kansas City by 8am. Thanks to Bryan for leading us to the highway that would get us back on our journey. We stopped at MiMi's Cafe just outside the city for a nice breakfast. A restaurant we both enjoy back home. We stopped and played Frisbee at a rest stop and made friends with a nice grandpa from Tennessee. We then stopped in Sioux City Iowa at Martial for some necessities that we forgot (keep in mind we left home yesterday). We then forged on to our final destination of Sioux Falls. On the way to Sioux Falls we saw a sign for the Corn Palace, but we didn't see what exit. So Katie's instincts told her to get off at the next exit. So we asked the gas station attendant where the Corn Palace was from this exit (thinking we had already missed the exit) the lady politely said "ma'am its about two and half hours north here" and then Katie graciously thanked her and we went on our way. We arrived in Sioux Falls and met Katie's mom at our hotel. ( Katie's mom happened to be on a business trip this week in Sioux Falls) We went to dinner at HyVee (a grocery store) and then headed over to see the famous Sioux Falls. The Falls were beautiful and while we were there we learned a lot about native americans from Katie's mom. We also stayed for the SPECTACULAR laser light presentation that started at sun down. Lets just say the presentation started off with O Danny Boy, don't get us wrong we felt right at home and we love the song, but we are in SOUTH DAKOTA not Dublin. We enjoyed the presentation about Chief Black Buffalo and Sacagewa (sack-og-a-wee-ah) in pink and blue on the side of a building, but we decided we could only take it for about 10 of the 40 minutes. We concluded the night with a nice frost bitten dilly bar from the Dairy Queen (0.4 miles from the hotel) that took us 30 minutes to find thanks to the POI function of Betsy's GPS.

View Pictures at our PICASA website: http://picasaweb.google.com/katiefitz918