Day 3. Kansas City, KS to Lincoln, IL 373 miles

This was mostly a driving day. Molly was awake for the first five of our six hour drive. She didn't even watch any videos during those five hours. She was a super-traveler and happily played with her stuffed animals and colored. Seems like one hundred times I had to role-play that Bear was screaming right when Pink Bunny was almost asleep. Or that Finn, our imaginary dog namedafter Molly's second-cousins' pet, was misbehaving and needed to be disciplined.

Molly's "coloring" in the backseat.
We had a leisurely hour-long lunch and play-time at a park in a little town in Missouri. We drove through mostly farmland with occasional tree-covered hills. We crossed the Mississippi River at Hannibal, MO, the home of Mark Twain.

Our Hampton Inn is brand-new and beautifiul, the nicest hotel of our trip so far. We enjoyed swimming, dinner, and playing with a local girl we met on a playground in the evening.

We're enjoying the cooler weather and less intense sun than we used to in Texas. I also have seen very few new residential developments. The big cities in Texas are surrounded by new growth.