Ohio to Oklahoma

St. Louis, Missouri
Sunday, July 2, 2006

After just one day of driving the open roads across country (Thea's first time, Tom's third) we started to decompress ever so slightly. Our first night we dined at the exotic Olive Garden (Tom's first time, Thea's third!) but after breakfast at good ol' Bob Evans, we vowed to follow the guidance of Jane & Michael Stern's book Roadfood (not to be confused with Roadkill). It lists hundreds of classic dive restaurants around the country that still exist, many from the original days when Route 66 was the only major road going west. Real food indigenous to the area…right up our alley!
Our first Roadfood experience was A Slice of Pie, a tiny, and I do mean tiny, little hole-in-the-wall in Rolla, Missouri (halfway between St. Louis and Springfield) that made us feel like we were eating in someone's kitchen. In addition to enjoying the midwest hospitality we dove into an enormous, and I do mean enormous, slice of heavenly flake-crusted home made chicken and mushroom pot pie. We then mustered up enough of an appetite to dive again, this time into the most velvety coconut cream pie we have ever experienced.
Having traveled some 725 miles through Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri we took in such sites as The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the MISS-I-SS-I-PP-I river, llamas grazing along the highway, and one of my favorites...a Starbuck's! We were ready to rest our heads at the Super 8 in Vinita, Oklahoma (most famous for its annual Will Rogers Memorial Rodeo and world’s Largest Calf Fry Cook-off where they brag about the consumption of nearly 2,000 lbs. of calf fries. Calf fries or "Rocky Mountain oysters", as some prefer to call them, are testicles of an animal such as calf, sheep, or boar. The younger the animal the better). We began to realize that it's not only the miles that are separating us from DC!