I love this car

I picked up my car yesterday and its safe to say I’m in love, the Challenger is the perfect car for the long straight roads, and its V8 gives me goose bumps! Its safe to say driving over here is a different experience to the UK, I managed 1.5 hours on cruise control yesterday without touching the brake or accelerator, controlling speed with my right thumb on the steering wheel definitely felt like playing a game. Unfortunately I ended up paying slightly more than what I’ve booked online but managed to negotiate from a $3200 price for the week down to $829, the lesson here is never take the first quote from a rental company!

Best driving song so far is Bon Jove Wanted, I have an urge to buy a new cowboy hat!

Driving from Chicago to St Louis has given me a real taste of just how flat and featureless the Mid West is, I’m going to be seeing a lot of flat featureless landscape over the next week, the particularly exciting shot below sums it up!

Arriving in St Louis was slightly more exciting and from this point forward I’ll officially be driving through the West.

The highlight of St Louis has definitely been going to a Cardinals game, I am still not entirely sure of the rules but there was lots of synchronised clapping at seemingly random times throughout the game, with a range melodies that everyone new, as well as mandatory moments of standing up that didn’t seem to bare any correlation to what was happening on the pitch, is it a pitch?

I did win a program signed by Jaime Garcia and resultantly was tweeted about, if you go to the @Cardinals twitter feed you’ll see a tweet with my picture in it!

The Highlight of the game for me though was eating a foot long hot dog and buying beer from a beer guy wandering the bleachers! The view of the stadium was also pretty impressive and the atmosphere was genuinely electric even though I didn’t really know what was going on!

I’m definitely heading into Tornado alley now, with pictures of Tornado shelters on the walls of the stadium and Tornados dominating the news on the Weather channel, the next 72 hours is set to see the largest outbreak of Tornados of the year so far. Hopefully I won’t need one of these today:

I’ve got an 8 hour drive ahead of me today so an early start once again, I’m aiming to get to Oklahoma city for 6pm so need to get a move on, a quick photo op at the arch and I’ll be on the road again.

(Packing update: I haven’t packed flip flops and will run out of pants next weekend, a shopping trip may be required!)