It looks like We have made it through the bad weather in the middle of the country. The stop at the arch in St Louis meant some extra driving around since the road along the river was closed. Flooding because of the high Mississippi River. there have been many flooded fields along the highway with rain still coming down.
We spent the night in Kansas City. The night was windy and the tornadoes occurred to the west of the city while we sleep peacefully in our beds. Thursday morning was cool (65: the coolest weather we've had since touching California) and the front had moved to the east leaving us to travel north behind all the bad weather.
The plan is to move quickly with long driving days so we can get home next week. We are getting tired of traveling around living out of suit cases. The boys also remembered things they would really like to do on the 16th (Monday) so we are looking at driving 11 hour days to make it home by then. It will be nice to sleep in our real beds after this trip.
I have a lot of picture processing to do when I get home. There are many panoramas to build from pictures and I have videos of some things that I thought would be better as video than still snaps.
We drove through Iowa today to get up to South Dakota. One the of main differences between here and the Southern states is the lack of billboards. Most of the south has zillions of billboards along the road. Even better, since the road service planted trees on both sides of the road, the billboards are on large green poles (large to withstand hurricanes) 50 to 100 feet in the air. What a visual mess.