Day 19.5: The Final Word

We crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois at 3:00, into Macon County at 5:00, and home at 5:30.  We had driven 3600 miles on this trip.   It was 967 miles to Colorado and approximately the same for the return trip.  That means that we drove nearly 1500 miles in the two weeks we were in Colorado.  That was a lot of curving roads up into the mountains and down into canyons.    We did make two road trips to Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming and Carol went to Denver.  The average cost per gallon was $3.51.  Both the highest ($3.71) and lowest ($3.32) being in Nebraska.

I will wrap this up with a comment on rest areas.  These are very important to a traveler.  We found that the rest areas in Nebraska were both the best and worse.  They are the best because they were clean and almost always had a connection to the land they sat on through history.  On the negative side, if you are towing something, the parking is terrible.  The space is limited and it is one lane running along the edge of the stop.  Many times as we were driving by, we could see there would not have been room for us had we wanted to stop.  On another note, there is not one rest area between St. Joseph, Missouri and Decatur.  That is over 300 miles.

It is hard to see but these are wheels representing the hundreds of wheels that crossed Nebraska on the Oregon Trail on this very spot.  This was a history lesson at a rest area in Nebraska.

One of the first things we saw when we crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois was this farm.  It had a nice collection of windmills and I loved the display of the huge American flag.

Even corn fields are beautiful.

We left the wide open spaces of Nebraska and Wyoming and drove into Illinois and tree-lined roads.