The Arrival

I am tired of writing about our trip, so this will be the last time that I do unless anyone has any questions. We left Iowa on Monday, July 16th, and during the final two days of our trip, we traveled through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, before finally arriving in New York. This gave us our first opportunity to drive on toll roads. I will write more about those later. The rest of the trip went pretty well.

On our first day back on the road we passed through south Chicago on our way to Maumee, Ohio, which is where we spent our last night on the road. That’s enough said about Maumee. On our final day we drove through Cleveland, passing by Jacob’s Field (home of the Cleveland Indians) and the Quicken Loans Arena (home of the Cleveland Cavaliers). We stopped about 20 miles outside of Cleveland at Kirtland and visited the first built LDS temple, which is currently owned by the Community of Christ. We finally arrived in Williamsville, New York on July 17th, at about 5pm.

It felt great to finally get off the road. Looking back now, I don’t think I would mind making the same trek again sometime, especially if we don’t have to drive a 26 foot moving truck. The pictures are as follows; 1st is a welcome (well come) from the folks at the Riverside Restaurant in Keokuk Iowa, 2nd is a picture of Alyssa and Ambrey standing in front of the Kirtland Temple, 3rd is a picture of the temple, 4th is a picture of our family in front of the temple, 5th Chris and Renee at the temple, and last but not least is a picture to prove that we drove safely.

Toll roads: anytime that you are required to pay cash for driving on a road, I think that you should be able to have certain expectations.

We took I-80/90 almost the entire way to New York, and in three different states we were required to pay a toll. New York and Indiana were reasonable, but we spent around $50.00 on tolls in Ohio. In case you haven’t been there, you’re not missing a whole lot. Cleveland appears interesting, and Kirtland was pretty cool, but that was about it. Anyways, I think that if you are expected to pay that much money for using the highway just one time, you should be able to have certain expectations of the highway. I would expect the highway to be in excellent shape, relatively clean, and road construction to be done at night. Lofty expectations I guess, but in comparison, the toll way in Indiana was less than ¼ of the price, clean, in excellent shape, and the areas of road construction were completely unobstructed.