Destination: Swannanoa, North Carolina ACCOMPLISHED Day #6

Slept in a bit until...6:45. Then I was up and packing, showering, and enjoying a B&B- provided breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, pancakes, and sweet strawberries. The owner even made my daughter special gluten-free pancakes in keeping with her dietary restrictions! Very appreciated.

Filled up with gas. Okay, I'll tell the truth. I dropped my daughter and her friend off at Cottey College then told my daughter I was going to the gas station. I stopped at the grocery and picked up cherry tomatoes, peaches, chips, an envelop of salmon, and a string cheese for her. Then I drove around looking for gargage SALES and then I went to pick her up. (She graduated from Cottey last May, it was her friend from South Carolina who needed to go there for her last year at Cottey.)

She said, "Did you get the gas?"

Oops. So I drove to the station and on the way I saw our highway out of town and started turning. She repeated, "Gas?"

Oops.  Turned around again.

                                                                            Typical neighborhood in Nevada, Missouri.

The route home is so simple. We take 71 to Kansas City where we take 435 until we reach the outer limits of the city and then take I-35 the rest of the way home. Daughter played extra with the camera as we were getting trip-silly. We laughed at our same old jokes about the little town named Peculiar.  I'm sure you can come up with your own silly remarks on that particular town.

Listened to lots of my Cajun music and French musique. Also listened to her RadioLabs. Learned that when performing CPR on someone, 100 compressions should be made each minute. Get this: if you sing a song in your head and press to the beat, you'll be more likely to make the correct number of compressions. Do you know which songs have 100 beats per minute? "Staying Alive" by the BeeGees and "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen. Oh, the irony.

My daughter crochets and made two hats and three jellyfish. They became our traveling companions. (You can buy them on Etsy, ask me for her site.)

We spied some road-kill: armadillo, fox or cayote, and yearling (deer). No pictures on those.

Overhead we saw a crop duster two-seater airplane and a hang glider as well as a roller coaster at Worlds of Fun.

We stopped at my hometown to meet, for the first time, my new niece Lucy who is 17 months old and has been a part of our family since January, 2011 when she arrived from Ethiopia. Cute, isn't she?  :-) My folks took us all out for dinner at a Japanese-Thai restaurant.

iconic Iowa field                     Crossing the Missouri             congestion after Hope, MN

Delapidated barn                   Albert Lea Lake                      My two hometowns

It's good to be home.