Day 2 of driving and today we are driving from wildwood, St. Louis to Carthage in Missouri. Its around 270 miles. We crossed the stateline from Illinois to Missouri last night before reaching the hotel. We got up pretty early about 7.15am although to be honest so long as we've had a good sleep it doesn't feel too early although I'm sure that will catch up with us at some point. We stayed at the wildwood hotel which was nice and we got complimentary breakfast which was a bonus even if it was help yourself on cardboard plates. We filled up on scrambled eggs, bacon and waffles. The waffles were pretty good as you made your own, well kind of. You filled a cup up of waffle mixture from a machine and poured it into a ... read more

Today it's Friday 4th April and we've all woken up fine with no sign of jet lag after a good nine hours sleep, it seems the delay helped a bit as we had more nap time yesterday. After skipping dinner last night we're nice and hungry for our first American breakfast which is going to be at Lou Mitchell's the famous diner at the start of Route 66. Hoping to take some photos although listening to the weather outside is awful! Howling winds and lots of rain, although being from Britain we're used to it! Today's plan is to visit willis tower, the famous bean, see the lake and a general wander round before the basketball game tonight which we've got tickets for. Today has been mostly spent on foot walking around Chicago. We've visited the ... read more

It's currently 9am and feels like I've been up for hours already although I suppose I have after the 5am start. We got a taxi to the train station and caught the 5.38am train direct through to Birmingham international airport. Kerry was already on the train getting on at Shrewsbury, and myself and steph were greeted to this woman in a bright pink hoodie waving at us from the other end of the carriage when we jumped on. The train journey was uneventful and half an hour after arriving at the airport we'd managed to already be the first to check in, get through security (search free for once!) and were sat in wetherspoons ordering breakfast. No beer ordered just yet! So far there's already three things I know I've forgotten, a mirror for my contact ... read more

So time is definitely going fast now, two weeks on Thursday we'll be heading off to Chicago. Talk has turned to how many shifts/days left to work and I've started to plan when I'll be shutting up shop to new orders, to allow the time to pack and double check everything. Myself and Steph have ordered an ipad mini each which should be arriving this week. We've managed to get a 64gb wifi and cellular one each for a good price giving us plenty of storage space for photos, video clips and of course music whilst we're away. I'm starting to think about how much electronic equipment I'm going to have on me in my hand luggage, half of it is going to have to come out for the scanner. There's going to be my iphone, ... read more

Finally got round to creating a blog in preparation for our Route 66 trip starting on 3rd April. There's going to be the usual three of us, me (Katie), Kerry and Steph. We started planning our trip in June last year and with just under 4 weeks to go everything is planned and booked apart from one last hotel stay for Oklahoma which will be booked in the next few days. We've tried to maintain the balance between doing plenty of research to ensure we make the most of the trip but not planning too much apart from the route and some key sights we want to see to ensure we can go with the flow and enjoy the experience. Our confirmed itinerary is to fly in Chicago from Birmingham (via Copenhagen) on Thursday 3rd April. ... read more