My sister moved out to Colorado in August and being the amazing big sister I am, I offered to drive out with her. The only problem I saw with this trip was that she likes to listed to her ipod in the car, but had to use a FM transmitter - and we all know those are garbage. I knew I couldn't handle that static sound for 3 days straight.
For a weird throw back birthday/early Christmas gift, I decided to gift her with a tape deck installation in her car (her stereo has a built in option for one), so she could use a tape converter thing that plugs into ipods and we (*ahem* she) could enjoy the sound of blissfully static-free music. I called up the Mazda dealership and inquired... luckily since it was just an optional component it wasn't too much (did you know that a whole factory stereo will cost you around $900?) Guess what? Now that it's 2011 and her car is from 2003, there was ONE of these tape deck inserts left in the country! They got it shipped in from California and the rest is history. Side note: The button on her stereo says tape/md, which I can only assume means mini-disk was the other optional component when the car was sold - talk about a failed media form!
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Before: with the blank space teasing us
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| After: with tape deck insert and just for fun, Bob's old Ice-T tape playing : ) Her stereo will never again play music like this I'm sure |
On to the actual road trip... I love seeing silly roadside attractions, so I got the Roadside America app for my phone. Most of the things we saw were planned ahead, but the pink elephant was a perfect accident. Partway through Tennessee, I happened to do a search and saw that in one mile there would be an exit and a giant pink elephant just a couple of miles down the road. Technology does have its benefits!
We took our sweet time and did the drive in three days that were each 8-9 hours of driving. Day One: we stopped in Asheville for lunch, Nashville for dinner, and spent the night in Clarksville, Tennessee (it was a really great hotel room, too bad it's so out of the way!). Day Two: lunch in St. Louis at Rooster (planned on purpose, I love that place), afternoon running around at the City Museum, dinner at T-Rex Cafe in Kansas City, and spent the night in Topeka, KS. Day Three: lunch snacking on the road, dinner at Casa Bonita in Denver, and spent the night in Boulder! Day Four: massages and bike ride around Boulder, lunch at the tea house, and sending me off to the airport.
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| First stop: Juice Shop in Winston Salem for a razzmatazz smoothie |
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| Knoxville, TN - A big thanks to Hungary's participation in the 1982 World's Fair for their working gigantic rubik's cube. Unfortunately it's not plugged in so the motor wasn't moving. |
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| Cookeville, TN |
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Nashville, TN: A life size replica of the Parthenon which is also an art museum |
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St Louis: Rooster Cafe, home of some of the bestest crepes ever (and gluten free!)
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| St Louis: City Museum which is more of a giant playground for adults and kids with kooky structures, tunnels and slides everywhere (including a 10 story one) and a rooftop playground complete with ferris wheel. Did I mention that they also sell alcohol? It was a totally different place in the afternoon than my previous visit which was at night! |
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| St Louis: City Museum's rooftop 10 stories up. The ferris wheel is slightly terrifying, but worth going on! |
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| St Louis: City Museum's 10 story slide using the old factory waste chutes! I slid down it last time and didn't really feel a need to go again : ) |
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| St Louis: The scene of the crime... When I was here on tour, I followed a too skinny friend between the lamp post and post box and smashed the camera in my pocket into the lamppost. Oops! It turned out ok, because a couple of weeks later in Indianapolis, we went to the mall with the Sony Store to replace my camera and I ended up finding my PERFECT wedding shoes too (after ordering a dozen pair from Zappos and searching shoe stores while traveling across the country) |
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| Kansas City, KS: Dinner at the T-Rex Cafe! |
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| Goodland, KS: Gigantic Van Gogh replica in the middle of a field |
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| Denver, CO: Casa Bonita restaurant has to be experienced to be believed. It's in an old strip mall department store and is HUGE. It's decorated like a tropical village and has a two story waterfall in the center. Every 15 minutes there's some kind of show with cliff divers or pirates or something! It's featured in an episode of South Park, you should check out the clips on youtube. |
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| Boulder, CO: riding bikes along Boulder's incredible bike path |
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