Indianapolis to Omaha, with stopover in St. Louis

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Our next day's drive was for us to arrive in Omaha, Nebraska, where our friends J and C have been living.  J was moved to the wilds of Nebraska due to his unfortunate involvement with the Air Force.

"But Kylara," you may say, "Why did you take such a silly route?  It would have made much more sense to detour up to Gary, Indiana and then take I-80 West instead of curling down around with I-70 West and then having to go south up I-29 in order to reach back to Omaha."

Well, yes.  You are correct geographically, but you are wrong on two, no, three counts:

I have been told on good authority that Gary, Indiana, is a place to be avoided at all costs.

This would have prevented us from making a perfectly good detour to St. Louis, by all accounts a much nicer place.

Your quicker route would also have us going through Iowa. I don't know if that's any worse than Missouri--but it SOUNDS like it should be worse.

This means that we picked Chris back up at the Trader Joe's and bought some food with a gift card given to Tomko by my aunt Julie about two years ago.  It was like magical, free money that I found while moving out of my house.  We had hummus and pita and ginger beer:  This could get us through any road trip.

In the car, we discovered that the three cans of soda that Laura had given us from her house had exploded when we left them overnight in the car in Lafayette.  The car was miraculously saved from being sticky-coated by the other contents of the milk crate they were in:  a pair of my pants and Tomko's jacket.  Tomko's black zip-up hoodie is the same one that he has always had, yes, I'm sure you've seen him wearing it before.

Unfortunately, when we went into Trader Joe's I put the wet hoodie on top of the car.  I thought that Tomko would get it when we went back in the car; Tomko either didn't see it or thought that I was getting it--at any rate, Tomko's hoodie now lies sadly in the parking lot of a Trader Joe's or somewhere near it.  Rest in peace, little hoodie.

Dan Hunter guided us into St. Louis by cell phone and then showed up excited to introduce us to his roommate (and their dog, who inexplicably found itself very upset at my presence but seemed to like Tomko and Chris just fine).  We went to eat at a diner place, the type with a dozen jukeboxes hanging on the walls as decoration, and saw bits and pieces of St. Louis on our walk.

Then we were off for Omaha!  It's a loooong, boring stretch of Missouri west to Kansas City, and then a loooong, boring but somewhat curvy stretch of the Missouri/Iowa-Nebraska border along the river.  Perhaps it is the Missouri River.  Rivers are so terribly named on maps and infrequently identified when they're anything bigger than a sign next to a tiny bridge labelled "Mountain Lake Stream", so I really don't know.  [Mountain Lake Stream:  An actual sign and location found in Virginia.  True story.]

At any rate, we got into Cedar Rapids, Iowa and crossed the river into Omaha, Nebraska.  Then the highway flung us north and east and back into Cedar Rapids.  I turned us around and we were teleported to another location without any of the proper exits, and ended up horribly lost and had to have J direct us there.

(A note to my friends:  So far, you all have been really good at giving directions.  Laura gave precise driving directions down to the second telling me what hills I'm passing over and when the road forks; Hunter prevented us from actually having to pay for parking somehow, and J managed to get me from the opposite end of town to his house in a city whose layout makes positively no sense.)

At J's house, we came in and were greeted by the two cutest Maine Coon/Siamese cats and then we were all like "welll... it's midnight," and then we all fell asleep.

Frederick, MD to Indianapolis, IN

We woke up at the house of our friends, Laura and Noah, in Middletown right outside of Frederick.  Being in Frederick cut at least an hour off of our day's drive, and besides we hadn't had the chance to see them for a while.

So our first day of driving didn't actually start at my parents' house, but we let late enough Tuesday evening that it seemed like we might as well stick it into this map.


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When we left Laura's house in Middletown, we had to backtrack a few miles east to Frederick, MD in order to pick up some prescription medication and meet up with Chris at a Rite-Aid. Chris's friends dropped him off and we wandered the store and eventually left en-route to Indianapolis!

A bit about Chris. He's a guy from the Baltimore suburbs. He responded to a post I made on Craigslist Rideshare offering a ride from Baltimore to Indianpolis, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver Island. His plan is to get to Portland, stay there for a few weeks with some friends, and then get a ride up to Alaska, his intended final destination. He buys every third tank of gas and shares driving duties with me so that neither of us fall asleep on the road. Good deal.

Since he had friends in Frederick, he had no problem meeting up with us that morning, and we got underway.

The drive to Indianapolis was largely uneventful. It is a drive that I have taken many times before, because our end destination (in Lafayette) is the house of Penny, Tomko's mother.

On our way, we dropped Chris off at a Trader Joe's near the house of his friend Rachel and planned to meet back up there the morning of Thursday, the fifth.

It was pretty late when we arrived at Penny's house, maybe 10pm, and we crashed out asleep soon after arriving. The following day was full of missions and visitations. We saw Penny's parents and two of Tomko's four siblings, along with a niece and nephew who dropped by. We missed seeing a third sister, Maria, because we fell asleep again before she got off of work. But we did manage to see a good many people before we set off the next day.