Here I am finally getting around to wrapping up the details of the rest of our trip back in March. But hey, better late than never right? Anywho, early on March 6th, we left our hotel in Memphis, TN and started heading north towards Iowa. It was a pretty dreary and occasionally very rainy day.
We made it a few hours down the road in what seemed like no time, mostly thanks to the intriguing audio book we were listening to, Skin by Ted Dekker. But we were starting to find it hard to stay awake, so decided it was time to find some decent coffee. We hadn't had any in far too long ;p We went a few miles out of the way and found a cute little place in Sikeston, MO called, The Knead.
They had amazing coffee, and were awesome guys. It was a fun little pit stop.
The rain just kept coming down for quite a while, so didn't capture any thing too incredible. (Not that there was much to see anyway haha)
Finally around 4:30 the rain started to let up and the scenery began to transition into hill country.
These trees were so beautiful!
It was about 5:30 when we crossed over the Missouri River into Iowa.
We arrived our friend's the Martinez's house at 7:45 right as a storm was rolling in to town. We spent about 5-10 minutes in the basement after the tornado sirens went off, but it passed over quickly without anything serious. The power turned off a little later and didn't come back on till about 1am. But we still managed to have a fun evening all hanging out and laughing far too much, thanks to being extremely tired ;p
The next morning we all slept in, had breakfast, hung out around the house and then Tia, Myles, Nathan, and I all went to IHOP and had an amazing lunch.
We drove around Cedar Rapids and did some shopping, then dropped the guys off to work on the breaks on Myles truck . While Tia and I went to Kohl's and Gordman's and found some good deals, and even picked out some cute things for Tia's new apartment.
We all met up later that afternoon and went to Stuff etc. (an awesome Iowa thrift store chain, I really wish was in MN too!) and got some great deals! We even found this very interesting Castle like dining room set. Would you want that in your house? It was only $5,000! haha
We all went and saw the new X-Men movie, Logan, that night at the movie theater in Cedar Rapids, and got back to the house around 10:30 or so. It was a wonderful day spent with wonderful people ;)
We said our goodbyes around 9:30 the next morning and started heading towards home.
The sun was out which was wonderful, but the wind was blowing like craaazzyy which didn't make for very pleasant driving conditions.
We have been looking for a second vehicle for a little while, so we took a little detour once we hit the Twin Cities and drove around St. Paul and the surrounding around looking at cars. It was fun, yet also frustrating since we didn't find anything that really worked for us. But we had a good time exploring some parts of the city we had never seen before.
After a little over an hour of car searching we figured we better get on our way, since we still had a four hour drive before we would be home.
We made it back safe and sound around 10:30pm both exhausted and yet also exhilarated by being able to take a break from normal life for a little while ;) Thanks for following along our journey once again!
