Journaling: The End

Perhaps you are thinking this has gone on long enough.  Perhaps we can wind this up.

We arose Sunday morning and drove to Springfield, Missouri, stopping there with the intention of
attending church and as we were driving down the main drag into town, behold a Salvation Army church sprang into view.  We pulled into the back of their parking lot, ascertained that it would be nearly an hour before morning worship service, changed duds (well, JoAnn did) and strolled around a bit.  We then went to the sanctuary where we had a nice visit with a superannuated SA officer who had been a missionary to China, Zimbabwe, Jamaica.  She must have been at least eighty, but looked like she could go some more miles yet.  Majors David and Barbara Zahn conducted a very good service and I felt as though I had been to church.

After Sunday brunch in Springfield, we drove on to Cuba where we asked directions to a camp facility.  Two or three different people directed us to the same place, about seven miles down the road.  "Sure," the attendant said, "drive on up to the office and I'll be right there."  A few minutes later he returned and pulled out a registration sheet and asked if we were Something-or-Other Club Members.  Well, having never heard of it, No.  "I'm sorry," he said, "I can't let you stay."  "Well, I said as I craned my neck to peer way upward into his steely eyes set into a head as big as a basketball, "you're big enough to enforce that."  He said he was sorry, it wasn't his choice, he just worked there.  Drove on to Stanton where we stayed in a KOA.  The weather was fantastic and the temperature at ten p.m. was still 69 degrees.*

Since JoAnn insisted we shun St. Louis, and since we would have arrived there during the morning rush hour, we turned north on Missouri 47.  Along the way, a brief detour placed us at a Bryan cemetery where there was a monument to Daniel Boone and his wife whose bones had been moved to Kentucky long ago.  The Bryans were Boone's inlaws.  A fantastically beautiful, if somewhat slow, drive along Missouri 59  brought us ultimately to US 61 on which we headed north.  We crossed the Mississippi at Louisiana, Missouri on US 54 and stopped for lunch at a cafe in Atlas-- can't miss it: the only one there.  54 ends at I-72 which took us to I-74 which we followed to Indiana 32 then jogged north on I-65 to Indiana 47 and lo, we were back home again in Tipton in a matter of minutes! It was not yet six p.m.

*It was in this same campground on a very rainy night almost exactly five years later that String Too Short to Tie was born.