We took Highway 287 from the park to Rawlins, WY, where we connected with I-80. The only thing we noticed that was noteworthy was how bad the land was in the Indian Reservation and how the only church inside the grounds was a Mormon church.
We decided before we got to Cheyenne that we would go through Nebraska instead of Kansas on our way back to Missouri, and because we had to stop in St. Joseph to let me out, we ended up saving several hours.
The highlights of the day's drive: lunch buffet at the KFC in Pine Bluffs, WY (the peach and lemon cobblers were particularly memorable), finding coupons for hotels in Nebraska, figuring out how far we were going to get, and contrasting the lack of tourist attractions in Nebraska with South Dakota. There are two, count 'em, two tourist attractions in Nebraska advertised on I-80: one is a pioneer village, and the other is an artifact that was constructed over the highway that houses a museum. The latter has its own radio station that attempts to attract the unwary motorist into "the only tourist attraction constructed OVER an interstate highway. Wow!" I'm not making it up, they really do say "Wow". A lot. In the interest of seeing how much of Nebraska we could cross in a day, we passed on the tourist attractions. A memorable feature of our trek across Nebraska was the density of bugs filled with yellow stuff. We had a little yellow explosion on our windshield every couple of miles, and we had to wash our windshield twice. The picture below of the truck's bumper will give you an idea of what it was like.
We amazed ourselves by getting all the way to Lincoln, and we used one of the coupons we'd found in the ubiquitous circulars that you get all along the interstates to get a discount at the motel where we stayed.
I'm going into day 8 here, but not much happened in the last two days of our trip. We ate breakfast at McDonald's in Nebraska City, and we found out that the reason Nebraska has so many more trees than Kansas is because J. Sterling Morton, Founder of Arbor Day, was from Nebraska, and when he did a stint as Secretary of State in NE, he got folks to plant trees. Lots of 'em.
We passed on the opportunity to eat again at the Hardee's in Mound City and waited until we got to St. Joseph. There was a Chinese all-you-can-eat place on the north end of the Belt Highway that was good and cheap. Andy dropped me off at the campus of Missouri Western, and after we figured out where I was supposed to stay, he left me with my stuff and went on to Columbia, where he freed Rusty from puppy prison (Horton's) and unpacked the truck. I stayed for the rest of the weekend at mini-hep school of the Central States District of the SPEBSQSA, where I got tips on how to be a better singer. A memorable feature of the stay at MWSC was the fact that they neglected to turn on the water heater until after we had gotten up on Saturday morning. Cold showers for the singers, and not many others were out running with me beforehand to warm up.