8.7.2021
Driving from CT to Columbus, OH
Our first day’s drive was about 8 hours from Connecticut to Columbus, OH. It was both of our longest car rides at the time and it was the first of our many 8+ hour drives.
The beginning of this drive was stressful, windy, rainy and there deers around every turn. After the NY thruway however, Pennsylvania was a breeze; Rolling hills, mountains, corn. As we got closer to Ohio the landscape slowly evened out.
The first night we stayed at a Motel 6 in Columbus, OH.
Taya got her wish with a great thunderstorm that unfortunately only lasted for 10 minutes.
After seeing lots of signs on the highway for it we realized we had both never had Bob Evans, so we decided to DoorDash it. Mac & Cheese with Chicken Tenders and Fries. It was pretty much what we expected.
We started our first of many roadtrip nighttime routines of packing our stuff so it’s ready in the morning, and getting everything as accessible as possible for the morning.
8.8.2021
Driving to Columbus, OH to Kansas City, KS
The next day we were starting to get a glimpse of what most of the country looks like as we headed towards Kansas City, flat, and a lot of corn. I mean that’s pretty much driving from Columbus to Kansas City on I-74/I-72. The only other thing was passing through Indianapolis (not really much) and Springfield Illinois as we decided to avoid I-70 through St. Louis.
As we approached Casey, IL we stopped at the World’s Largest World’s Largest Attraction Place Thing. Basically there was a bunch of giant models of household items like the World’s Biggest Rocking Chair, Ticonderoga Pencil, and Mouse Trap.
After visiting the interesting “roadside” attraction, we drove a few more hours to our last stop of the day. Our hotel we had booked was in Liberty, MO the drive time was around 11-12 hours.
When we got to the “Hotel” we were very confused if we were at the right place. There were families dressed nicely, touring the Winery and the very old brick building.
We walked in looking for the check-in and were greeted with high ceilings and a bar where there were a handful of people in. We figured we would just ask the bartender where the hotel was and he handed us our keys. “For Jarrod?”. “Yahhh…” The bartender (who we later found out was the owner of the place), let us know where our room was and we followed his directions and made our way to our room. We noticed then that there were only 4 or 5 rooms and we were probably the only people staying there. It definitely was weird but the place was really nice and we figured we scored a great price on a fancy hotel. We got to the hotel, cleansed, and as Taya was showering I noticed a journal on the desk. It was a notebook with reviews from previous stays. I started to flip through it and saw this:
This was a funny one but the others more haunting. Of course somehow we picked the haunted hotel to stay in for the night… I was not having it. For one we were very tired, and also, I am not one for haunted houses and halloween activities. All we wanted to do was have a nice quiet place to sleep and found a place where we were going to be messed around with all night tricked into thinking we were in a haunted house. If you are one for Haunted Houses here is the link to stay here lol. https://www.belvoirwinery.com. So we quickly decided to just take the loss on the hotel, leave immediately, and book a last second hotel. So we left our hotel at around 7:00 and headed our way closer to Kansas City at a normal chain hotel that was actually really nice.
We both called our parents to tell them what happened and read reviews of the hotel in the hotel lobby. We couldn’t find one review about the Haunted House part until about half way scrolling through all the review on Expedia. We agreed for the rest of the trip to READ MORE REVIEWS (please also do that if you want to avoid bad experiences). Going to sleep that night was so satisfying and it felt so good to relax.