St. Louis, MO to Brookings, SD 4/12-4/14

After leaving Nashville, we made our way to St. Louis, which is a spot we would love to come back to as well.  Spent the night in the Cracker Barrel parking lot and woke up the next morning and enjoyed our free breakfast before we check off the Six Flags from the list of parks we have left to visit.  We weren't impressed at all with the rides but it was fun to visit and check it off our list of parks we have visited.  They really didn't have any extreme rides expect for the swings, which made Chris extremely nervous, we both hate swing rides.  After six flags, we headed into the city and took pictures at the arch and walked the river front.  It brought back memorizes for me.  When I was 14, my mom, my gymnastics coach and I traveled to St. Louis for me to compete in the first ever State Games of America competition.  It was fun to remember the good memorizes I had that summer.  The arch is just amazing to see.  Its so big.  After exploring we made our way to my aunt and uncles house for the night.  I had been in contact with my cousin letting her know we might be in the area but wasn't sure if we would be spending the night or not.  So we surprised my aunt and uncle, who I haven't seen in a too many years.  It was nice to see family again and catch up on everything.  The next morning we had breakfast with them and my cousins and left to start our journey north to Canada.  We intended to only spend the day in St. Louis but we spent the night because of the major blizzard that was hitting Fargo would not have been fun driving in it.  When we left on Sunday, the weather was not pretty but we told ourselves to only go as far as it was safe, which was Brookings, SD, just north of Sioux Falls.  We woke up today (Monday) and started our drive to Canada but only made it an hour up the road and had to pull over because of bad road conditions and bad wind.  After multiple times of ice skating on the highway and watching a trucker almost jackknife in front of us at 25mph, we pulled into a gas station put the chains on, got gas and looked at each other and said "maybe we should wait a little longer".  After an hour and half, we watched the snow plows leave the gas station and figured we should test the roads out.  The highway was clear so we took off the chains and started north.  Wouldn't have figured they just got hit by a blizzard. 

  family

  Go Alex Smith in his new home in KC  after the roads were plowed to scared to take pics while driving with the roads iced over