First Stop

From St. Charles, Missouri, the "Corps of Discovery" followed the Mississippi to their first stop — La Charette, the last Euro-American settlement on the Missouri River. 

So many people told us that we would have more junk than we realized when we started packing - that we would have boxes on boxes of stuff we didn't know we even had. But we didn't believe them. We're young and stuff. We don't have that much. Turns out, you can actually fit a lot more junk into a one-bedroom apartment than we realized we could and, well, all those "so many people" were right. Unfortunately, packing it all up took HOURS longer than we had anticipated.  When we expected to leave town at 3pm, we ended up heading out at 11:00pm with a 6 hour drive in front of us. Which we thought would be fine because, after all, we're young and stuff.

We arrived in Northern California at Clark's parent's home, the last Hedrick settlement on the Lizzie and Clark expedition, sometime during sunrise the next day. We slept solid till afternoon. Then took a nap.

Here are some pictures from the first stop of our expedition:

After all that packing up, the next obvious thing to do was to unpack some old memories. Clark found some pretty neat stuff in his parent's garage. Including some beloved stuffed animals, a "why we love Clark" poster, and a letterman's jacket.

What a stud!

We played games with his family. This one was Yahtzee. Clark won, per usual. Andrei shared candy.

Clark's dad makes some of the most amazing meals! This meal included duck sausage with onions and bell peppers. The night before this, we had antelope burgers fondly known as "boygas" (which took me far too long to figure out what they were saying...).

Somebody, who shall remain nameless, clearly didn't do a good job of making sure she made it into pictures. Don't worry mom, they'll be here with the next post!