In March I made a trip back to Missouri with my oldest sister. It was a trip to accomplish a couple of things, 1) to visit with Great Aunts and Uncles that are getting older and might not be with us much longer, and 2) to do some genealogy research. Having planned the trip in a day, and deciding to go without even consulting my husband first, I was a little afraid I was doomed for a bad trip. It wasn’t until a couple of nights before we were to fly out when my sister called to tell me that our hotel reservations fell through that I really started to worry. It would be ok though, thankfully.

We actually ended up having a wonderful time. We visited the Oklahoma City Bombing memorial. We played tourists on Route 66, stopping in Chandler, OK to take pictures next to the route 66 sign. We detoured into Kansas, just to take pictures next to the state sign and say we’d been there. I think we also managed to stop at nearly all the Sonic’s between Oklahoma City and Richland, MO. We even visited a Steak & Shake in Springfield, Mo. Tasty!

As for the hotel situation…well, that was interesting, in more than one instance. We have a Great Aunt that volunteered to make reservations for us at a hotel in Lebanon, MO. She’s rather persistant, so we went ahead and let her since our reservations at Ft. Leonard Wood fell through. Getting into Lebanon late Saturday evening, we went to the hotel we believed our reservations were at. Into the lobby, talked to the clerk - nope, no reservations. hmm… ok. We thought we’d try the next hotel. Into the lobby, talked to the clerk - nope, no reservations. Fine, we’ll just get a room there. It’s cheap and we’re tired. We made sure they had internet access and we were good to go. We get to the room, unload all 10 bags and neither of us are very impressed by the place. After fooling with the wireless internet for about 10 minutes, even calling down to the front desk asking about the connection and being told that I need to plug into the Cat5 in order for the wireless to work, I was getting to the end of my rope. Even though I knew how ridiculous the statement about the cat 5 was, I looked around for someplace to plug in for internet. Nothing. That’s it. I called the front desk, demanded a refund and told my sister we were going to the Super 8. Thankfully that was a clean hotel, with wonderful pillow-top beds and internet that worked…and even better, it didn’t smell funny.