Day One:  June 1, 2009
St. Louis, Missouri to North Platte, Nebraska.
Distance: 673 mi (~ 10 hrs)

As previously mentioned we didn’t exactly leave early. But the timing was in our favor as we missed all rush hour traffic. The closest we came to hitting some was in Kansas City, and this was also a spot where we ran into a detour marked on the road that was not in our mapped route. It was quite a different route but the Atlas proved its worth early on to calm our anxiety about the deviation. The detour only ended up adding maybe 10 extra miles, so not a big deal.

Day one was all about keeping an eye on the U-Haul towing dolly hauling my car. I kept glancing at it, making sure my car was still there!

Day one we also hit a bunch of crappy weather. Make of it what you will, but we were driving through the worst of it in – Oregon, Missouri! Weird huh.

Despite pummeling hail the vehicles were okay. The worst casualty we experienced was the utter battering of the tarp over the back of the truck.

We drove in a sliver of Iowa.

After a rainy entry to Nebraska we drove in the dark on a highway surrounded by vast flatlands, and for a couple of hours we could see lightning storms happening miles away.