Day Nine

We left St. Peters, Missouri around 9am, grabbed a quick breakfast and some iced coffees and hit the road. I drove the first leg, about 2.5 hours, to Uranus Fudge Factory in St. Robert, Missouri. I still am not sure I understand what exactly this place is... it is about a mile off the highway, I think the only way to explain is that it's a "road side attraction". There are large dinosaurs when you enter the parking lot and a row of connected buildings consisting of some seemingly abandoned tiny restaurants, a sideshow circus museum, a tattoo shop, and at the very end, a general store and fudge factory. The whole place is basically a joke, as they have signs everywhere making jokes about the word Uranus. Ex: t-shirts that say "Uranus Mortuary, we bury 'em deep in Uranus" and "Parks & Recreation, City of Uranus. People love to play in Uranus!" We had some good laughs, the boys got some candy, and we spent a while at a small shaded play area consisting of a corn hole set and oversized Connect-4. The people here were all very friendly, even going as far as taking the bag of garbage from the car out of Josh's hand and offering to throw it away for him when we parked. One specific employee however, really stood out and that was the cashier inside of the general store. Immediately upon the door opening to the store a 20-something year old woman yells one of two sayings: "WELCOME TO URANUS!" or "THANKS FOR PICKING URANUS!" I just can't help but imagine what it is like to do this all day. Like... imagine if she is a full time employee, working 40-ish hours a week and probably yells this hundreds of times a day, probably a thousand times a week or more. I have to imagine it's oddly fulfilling... you catch people off guard as they enter the store and immediately make them laugh (or at least a small chuckle). I'd love to know everything about this girl working today. I mean everything. How did she get this job? Did she have to perform these shouts to be hired? What is her family like? Is she married? Children? Parents? Education level? Family history? I'll never know anything more about this girl, and that's fine, but I will always wonder what her story is. Note: future novel idea.

Josh drove the second leg of the trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Neither of us have been to the midwest really, and Tulsa (at least where the hotel is) is surprisingly a cute city. We got a delicious dinner from a restaurant called Lone Wolf that specializes in Banh Mi, Kimchi Fries, and Fried Rice Bowls. Hands down this absolutely was the best food we have eaten so far on the trip. (And by we I mean Josh and I). I was hesitant to order from here because it's owned by someone named Phil Phillips, and I've always jokingly said you can't trust a person with 2 first names, but I'm glad we did and while I still don't trust anyone with 2 first names, I'm able to look past it when they make food this quality.

We swam at the hotel tonight, one of the several toys the boys had convinced us to buy was a shark and fish toy that is for the pool. Teddy seemed to not be able to grasp the concept of sharing with his brother and sadly his swim time was cut very short as a result of this, however I had some quality time with Henry swimming and playing sharks which was nice. The boys behaved much better today which made for a much more enjoyable day than the most recent driving day. Honestly the Kindles are the reason why we are surviving this. Between various PJ Mask, Lion Guard, Daniel Tiger, Wild Kratts, and painting games, the boys are able to stay entertained for long periods of time. Josh and I had packed headphones for the boys and of course forgot about them until today when we were soooooo very thankful for them. Teddy refused to keep them on his ears so we still had the noise from his games in the background while we drove, but Henry kept his on which was fantastic since he has little realization for how loud things are and often one of says "please turn that down" at least a hundred times during a trip. The amusing part of headphones on a 4 year old for really the first time, is that for the first 20 minutes of wearing them he repeatedly shouted "CAN YOU HEAR THIS? WAIT ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN'T HEAR THIS?????" at the top of his lungs, and then every so often would startle us all by yelling something absurdly loud. Picture this... car is quiet, Teddy is napping, Henry is wearing headphones, Josh and I are chatting quietly when all of a sudden you hear "MAMA DADDA I NEED TO PEE!!!!!!!" and jump a mile. That's what most of the driving time looked like. We did have some time where the boys were entertained and we could get through a couple enjoyable podcasts. A Dax Shepard interview of David Sedaris and a Stuff You Should Know about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both were interesting and worth listening to and kept our attention for a couple hours anyway.

Tonight we will all sleep well fingers crossed, and we haven't given a single thought as to what tomorrow will consist of, and that is totally okay.

Stay Tuned!