Missouri and a "Change in Plans"

  Springfield, Missouri, United States
Thursday, August 14, 2008

 
Wed.
Since we left Las Vegas later yesterday, we knew we would have a big drive ahead of us today to make it as close to St. Louis as we could.  We drove through New Mexico and into Texas by 10:30 AM. We made a stop at the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. For those who don't know about Stanley Marsh's Cadillac Ranch it's located on the historic Route 66.  Some years ago a farmer decided to row of Cadillacs on angles and buried them up to their windshields. For years, people have been visiting the site and leaving their mark by spray painting messages on the cars. We brought some sharpies along and left a few messages and enjoyed getting photos. The only drawback-it was very muddy and Jennifer took a good slide in the mud!  Before assisting her, we took various photos at all angles!  There were many others who had stopped to visit the site as well.
From Texas, we crossed into Oklahoma and this is the state we spent most of the day getting through. The routing took us 8 hours through the center of the state. Other than the state being famous for Garth Brooks and Sam Walton we didn't really see anything else exciting that it had to offer. Much of the state is unpopulated for miles and it appears that the bulk of the population reside in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.  We crossed into Missouri at 8:30PM and drove until we reached Springfield at 10:30PM.  This was one of our longest days so everyone was pretty beat. We had a 3 hour drive ahead of us to St. Louis where we planned to spend 2 nts. before returning home.
A CHANGE IN PLANS!!!




Around 1:30AM, Jennifer woke up with really bad stomach pains. By 3AM, the pain was getting worse so we decided we should take her to the Emergency. Lucky for us, the hospital was 5 minutes away. We went to a Ozark Community Hospital and there were no other patients in the Emergency when we arrived.  Jenn was taken right away and had blood work x-rays and a CAT scan done within 2 hours. The service and care provided was totally unbelievable.  They even offered us coffee and food and the hospitals don't charge for parking.  It turned out the Jennifer needed to have her appendix removed.  Being a small hospital they didn't have a surgeon available to do the surgery in the morning so they arranged for her to be transferred to one of the larger hospitals in

Springfield. Springfield has a large number of medical facilities including 3 hospitals-2 of them being very large and the city only has a population of just over 200,000. The next city, St. Louis is over 200 miles away so the city serves a wide area. The hospital made the arrangements for the surgery and transfer and after calling for a transfer the ambulance arrived within 10 minutes.  Jennifer had her appendix removed and was in recovery by 1PM. The plan was to have her discharged by 5:30 but her pain was still quite bad so they asked her if she wanted to stay another night.  She stayed in the Children's Ward since she is still under 16. The care there was also amazing.  I was able to stay overnight with her. She had a private room and there was a pullout bed in the room.  She was discharged by 10AM. She's pretty sore but has some good meds to keep her going.  I guess we will be seeing St. Louis on another journey. We departed Springfield at 12:30PM and plan to take a little extra time getting home since Jennifer will need to have a few extra stretch breaks on the return. We all agree if it was going to happen it was better that it happened now and not during the middle of our trip! 
Missouri is a very pretty state, much of it consisting of a scenic drive through the Ozark Mountains. From Missouri, we crossed into Illinois for a short time. We crossed into Indiana around 7PM and got off the road at 9:30 just past Indianapolis. We are now back in our own time zone so it's really 10:30 here. Jenn did fine. The pain meds work well and we made frequent stops for her to stretch. We have about 13 more hours to go so if all goes well we'll be home by tomorrow night. Good Night!
  St. Louis---This will be another trip!