Eastern Missouri Feels a lot more like Home

I spent last night in mid Ohio, awakening periodically to thunderous crashes of...well, thunder and lightning and the sky just dumping water.  Woke up to clear cloudless skies and headed westward ho!  Had I wagons, they would have started circling around 1 pm.  I've safely crossed the rest of Ohio, and fully traversed Indiana without incident:  but southern Illinois is looking pretty threatening.  Just as I'm about to talk to the wagon master about pulling over and hunkering down, it opens up. Hail, rain and more rain.  Temps drop about 50 degrees and in the four or five minutes it takes me to find an exit off the trail and find cover (gas station) I am soaked through.  I get a hot beverage without having to build a fire (how did the conestoga folks survive!) and decide to wait it out.  A nice lady with a smart phone (how have I ever managed to survive so far without one) checks the radar and I look good to go west.  She, the poor thing, is traveling east with the storm.  But she's in an SUV and does not deserve to look so nervous.  Sure enough the sun reappears, and I have to pull over again to take off the rain gear I put on too late and to no avail. ah well.

The landscape of gas station and trailside eateries is starting to look familiar again.  The east had odd looking jumbles of commerce strewn haphazardly around.  The west tends to be more organized, having , no doubt, the luxury of space in which to be organized.  Road engineering is also improving. The east depends for safe interchanges on everyone around already knowing where they are going.  There are tremendously unsafe highway and road connections east of the Mississippi compared to western standards.

All and all, it is starting to feel like the west again.  If my wagon train can only make it through the wild west of Missouri and Kansas,,,,remember this was Jesse James country....I should be OK.  Colorado weather, Utah and Nevada heat and then blessed California.  See you soon.