Our Cross Country Adventure -- Part Three

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
Z and Jer in front of the huge Superman statue.
Z in the Superman Museum.

Z becoming Superman in the phone booth.

With our friends at the Gatlinburg Aquarium. Z touching a horseshoe crab at the aquarium. Thursday, April 10th we left Nauvoo. First we went to Hannibal, Missouri where Mark Twain grew up. It was a fun little town on the Mississippi River. We went through his boyhood home and other homes that he writes about in his books. We also went through a museum about him. It was nice weather until we started driving again and then it got really rainy again. When we got to St. Louis we took some pictures of the Arch, but we didn't get out because of the rain (we also were below the arch next to the river because that's where the GPS had taken us and we weren't sure how to get closer to it). We traveled to Paducah, Kentucky where we stayed the night. We had actually planned on staying in Paducah -- yeah! When we got to the hotel, Z asked where Grandma and Grandpa was. He had assumed that they had followed us from Nauvoo and were still going to be with us. Cute boy! Friday morning we got up and went to Metropolis, Illinois where they have a huge statue of Superman and a museum of Superman memorabilia. The museum was an interesting collection of everything Superman. Z thought it was great. We then traveled through Tennessee. We went on a quest to find a White Castle restaurant and found one in a seedy part of Nashville. We were not too impressed by the hamburgers, but that could have been because they were a little cold by the time we ate them. We had waited to eat until we were further out of the city:) That night we stayed in Knoxville with our friends. They had moved away from us in October and now both of us were going to be out East. It was so fun to see them. We highly recommend their bed and breakfast:) We had planned to leave Saturday to go to North Carolina, but we wanted to visit more. They took us up in the mountains to Gatlinburg and we went to Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies. How cool! The shark tank where you stand on a moving walkway and the fish swim to the sides of you and over your head was fun. I also enjoyed the jelly fish. We drove through the Great Smoky Mountains and they are really pretty. Sunday we woke up and they helped me set up our blog, they took pictures of B and then we were on our way to our new house. To be able to get to our new house quicker, I reminded Jer that we would be living here in the state so we could come back and see the things that he wanted to see. We arrived quite late and so our adventure in North Carolina begins!