It was another big day of driving along Route 66 today so lots of stops along the way too. Interestingly though many of the things we had planned to look at weren't open because it was a Sunday (hadn't thought of that when we planned the trip).
We did find the Dixie truck stop in McLean though, along with the Bunyon Statue in Atlanta, Railsplitter Covered Wagon in Lincoln (very disappointed when we got to this one - turns out there's no relevance to it really at all. Built in the early 2000's by someone and it's a huge covered wagon - has nothing to do with Route 66 except that they placed it there.), the Lauterbach Giant in Springfield. We took a small detour off Route 66 to go and check out another small covered bridge at Glenarm (Sugar Creek Covered Bridge) and then found the small section of Historic Brick Road at Auburn. The cool part we hadn't realised was that you can actually still drive the entire section of brick road that's there. (so of course we did).
It was already getting late by then so we headed back towards the Interstate for a short while and headed on to St Louis. Before finding our hotel we went and looked for the Chain of Rocks Bridge, another Route 66 icon - an offset bridge that linked both the Missouri and Illinois sides of the Mississippi River.
I know I said it before, but she is a BIG river.

The drive into our hotel was interesting, purely because it was evident that St Louis would probably be considered a poorer city. At least, that's how it seems to us. The suburbs, that are only a couple of minutes drive from downtown are really sad looking places, buildings falling down, burned, boarded up. Craig is amazed by the techniques used here. We drove past a building, the top stories of which are crumbling and giving way onto the pavement and road below - they haven't pulled the building down, no, there's just a big witches hat style cone on the road forcing you to drive out and around the bricks that have fallen. Yep, safety first it seems. (Eek!)

Our hotel is pretty cool. They have a happy hour from 5.30 till 7 where registered guests can have three free alcoholic drinks and free hot food and there are free soft drinks and pop corn for the kids for quite a few hours as well.
So far, so good for Route 66.