After a few hours of sleep, I’m ready to talk some more about the first day of our trip. Between the musty smell of the room and lack of sleep, I left out a few tales from the road when I posted last night.

Tale number uno: No room at the Days Inn.

We got to the hotel around midnight, only to find that there were no rooms available. Fortunately we didn’t have to make our beds in a barn, an Econolodge a few miles away still had eight rooms available.

Who knew Hannibal, Mo. Was such a hoppin’ place?

The moral of this story is not to accept from online reservations that there are still rooms available, and make your reservations in advance. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have ended up in a musty room with only one working light. But to give the Econolodge credit, the room looked pretty clean, the staff was friendly and the hot breakfast wasn’t bad at all. And as soon as I post this, I’m contacting our campgrounds for the next couple of nights and making reservations.

Tale number dos: Lynnville, Ind.

It was dinner time yesterday evening and none of had eaten anything since the morning, therefore we were starved. Restaurants were few and far between on I-64 in the Middle of Nowhere, Indiana, and the few snacks we had with us weren’t holding us over anymore. Before we got to the point where we all started visualizing each other as our next meals, we stopped in Lynnville. The only thing we could find open was a teeny hole-in-the-wall diner that doubled as the town’s Blockbuster Video. I think the best (read: most entertaining) thing about this diner was that just about everyone who came in ordered a half a case of beer at the counter, cracked one open immediately, and then took the opened beer and case to their table. (When I make it to Wi-Fi again, I’ll post a picture of the diner. 🙂

Tale number tres: Meet Sailor Moon.

Waaaay back in the summer Amanda and I discussed what we should name the rental car. We tossed around several different ideas, bit none of them fit this car. We ended up with an electric blue Corolla carrying Georgia plates. The first step to naming the baby was determining its gender. We couldn’t decide. Cory thought it was a girl, Amanda thought it was a boy. So, we determined he (she?) is a tranny. He (she?) is going to be really excited when we make it to San Francisco.

It only makes sense that a transvestite Japanese Georgia peach would have an anime name. We took votes through Amanda’s blog and Facebook to decide her (his?) name and when the polls closed last night, Sailor Moon won. The only complaint I have about him (her?) is his (her?) speakers are blown. We can only listen to moderately loud music on the road.

So far today we have seen Mark Twain’s boyhood home (pictures to follow!) With the help of Sailor Moon and Sheila, we’re on our way to see the biggest ball of twine.

I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of our fully-loaded car. (Look closely and you’ll see Amanda in the back of one of these pictures!