Day 2 - You Are What You Eat

Day 2 on our Rt. 66 road trip has been fantastic. We left Kokomo at 7:30 am EST and headed north to Chicago. Our plan was to fuel up with some deep dish pizza from Lou Malnati's for lunch and then head south on the Mother Road. This proved more difficult than we thought because we arrived at Chicago promptly at 11 am EST, exactly one hour before the 11 am CST opening time. We vowed to account for the time change when crossing the next time zone.

On our way to the pizza shop, we passed a legendary roadside attraction we didn't realize was even there. It's the home of the Christian syndicated radio program, "Unshackled." We took this picture for Pam, Marcia's mother who was a frequent listener (and who was celebrating her birthday today- Happy Birthday, Pam!!).



We ate lunch mid day - a delicious large deep dish pizza - and then navigated to the start of the road. With "Get Your Kicks on Rt. 66" cranked, we headed down the road!



The first real stop was Springfield, IL. We had to stop for a few reasons, most importantly, because it is the fictional home of Guiding Light, the soap opera we've all been following for ten years (refer to first post to see a pic of us at the 2001 GL Fan Club Convention in NYC). We had a lot of laughs over all the Springfield stuff. We also toured the Lincoln home (National Historic Park) and saw where Abe and Mary Todd spent their non-DC days. Out of all the Park Rangers, this one was definitely the cutest....



On our way out of town we stopped at the legendary Cozy Drive In, the home of the Cozy Dog. This place was where the corn dog was invented.





Then we headed south to St. Louis. We had a lovely evening with Marcia's Aunt Tracey, her fiance Kurt, and his daughter Emelia. Kurt cooked us a fantastic dinner (have you noticed the common theme of our day yet?!) and Tracey took us on a local neighborhood bar tour. The most interesting stop of the night was an eclectic bar called the Venice Cafe. The pictures say it all... Here is one of our favorites of us posing in one of the seating areas surrounded by a bunch of naked baby dolls. The whole place was pretty random.



The last item on our agenda was a stop at Ted Drewes Custard Shop (which Emily kept mistakenly calling "Thomas Druce's") for concrete (thickkkk) milk shakes. We almost didn't make it there due to a run-in with a DUD (doped up driver) who passed us illegially almost causing a head-on collision with the car on the other side of the street. Emily beeped her horn in anger at the doper much to Marcia & Kristina's chagrin due to the fact that we were rendered defenseless since the sword had already been unloaded in Tracey's house. While attempting to eat our shakes, we had a nice chat with a uniformed security guard permanently stationed outside the ice cream stand.



Daily Recap:
We ate an entire deep dish pizza.
We snacked on potato chips, caramels, laffy taffy, and other junk.
We ate 2 corn dogs.
We ate a huge dinner with Tracey and Kurt.
We ate 3 concrete shakes.
We ate WAY too much!