Rob Lowe Views This Blog

It's official: Rob Lowe (the actual, real, human Rob Lowe) has seen this website!

The niece of one of my co-workers, Pat, works as Rob Lowe's assistant. What are the odds!?!? She told her niece about the website... her niece showed Rob... and the rest is history.

Rob had Pat's niece pass along this signed photograph. I love the note -- "Thanks for the travels!!"

Thanks Pat and Pat's niece! And thanks Rob! Stay tuned as (wooden) Rob and I strive to complete our goal of visiting all 50 states...

St. Louis

If you look closely you can see Rob at the very bottom of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

Rob had to pass through security screening to enter the Jefferson Expansion Museum located below the Gateway Arch!

After visiting the Arch we headed over to Pappy's Smokehouse, one of the best BBQ places St. Louis has to offer.

Inside Pappy's. Highly recommended!

Rob gets a new state -- KANSAS!

Rob officially crosses into his 44th visited state -- Kansas! Only 6 states left to visit!

For Rob's first night in Kansas, he wanted to stay in Colby.

Usually while on the road, we try to avoid chain or fast food restaurants in favor of local one-of-a-kind places. In order to find good local dinner places we usually refer to yelp.com, roadfood.com, or urbanspoon.com. One place from Colby caught our eye on yelp.com -- it seemed like a true local hangout (maybe even bordering on being too local), it served beer, and it even said there were great pictures of tornadoes decorating the walls (and it's been a longtime wish of mine to witness a tornado from a safe distance). So we hopped in the car and drove to Twisters! Great food, interesting locals, cold beer, tornado pics, and even a side dish called German french fries. Thanks, Twisters!

When we realized how close we were to Nebraska, we planned a route that would take us through Nebraska and have us enter back into Kansas right by the next stop on our trip. Welcome to Nebraska!

Soon after entering back into Kansas, we arrived at the geographical center of the USA. And guess what? The center of the United States is... in the center of nowhere!

So this is it -- the official geographical center of the USA!

There is a small chapel at the center of the USA. It has seating for 8.

Cawker City, Kansas is down the road a bit from the center of the USA. Time to see the world's largest ball of twine!

"Downtown" Cawker City. This is IT. After this patch of buildings the landscape goes right back to cornfields.

Rob. Me. Twine. At last.

So sad we could not be there for the Twine-a-thon! That would have been an experience!

Residents of Cawker City are very trusting -- they let visitors go right up and touch the ball of twine.

After the Center and the Twine, we continued our drive east and made it almost to the Kansas - Missouri border. We stayed in Lawrence, Kansas and I found perhaps the one and only town in Kansas where I think I could live happily. Lawrence is a great town with a downtown area large enough to keep you from getting bored yet not so big and busy as to be intimidating. There are no pictures from Lawrence, but we owe another round of thanks to yelp.com for helping us find a wonderful place for dinner -- the Free State Brewing Company. Thanks, Free State!

Four Corners

After leaving Blanding, Utah we headed down to the Four Corners, where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico all meet. We officially crossed into Colorado on our way there.

Four Corners!

Rob Lowe is officially in all four states at the same time.

My feet are planted firmly in Utah and New Mexico while my arms extend into Arizona and Colorado (with Rob).

Though my car wasn't too thrilled with this, after Four Corners we headed back east through Colorado and the Rocky Mountains. A Ford Focus with two passengers (three, if you count Rob) and several weeks worth of luggage can make it over the Rockies, but sometimes it's a hard task. There were times we couldn't drive any higher than 25 mph even with the car in 2nd or 3rd gear.

While driving up to the top of Monarch Pass, we actually had to concentrate on breathing. I never realized how many days I spent without once stopping to realize how easy the simple act of breathing was. Walking around and taking pictures was a slow process, with frequent breaks from walking to concentrate on breathing enough! I couldn't get over the fact that we saw people riding their bikes up the mountains while we could barely make it up in a car.

Most of the time as we were winding up and down each mountain, there was no guardrail to keep the cars from driving right off of the steep cliffs. It was a beautiful drive but definitely not one I'd like to do at night or in the snow!

Balanced Rock in Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.

Arches and Canyonlands National Parks

Here we are about to enter Arches National Park.

The Three Gossips are on the left.

Balanced Rock

Everyone wanted to add their own balanced rock contributions near the Balanced Rock. We saw these all around Balanced Rock, and even down the road in Canyonlands National Park.

The iconic Delicate Arch, which also appears on Utah's license plates. We opted not to walk the 0.5-mile, 200-ft climb up to see it a little closer. It would have been the equivalent of climbing 20 flights of stairs! Maybe next time...?

This is the road leading into and out of Arches National Park.

Just up the road from Arches is the entrance to Canyonlands National Park.

The road leading into Canyonlands was utterly deserted, so we had some empty-road fun!

Try as I might, I couldn't find a place to perform the traditional "climbing out of the canyon" photo op. So how about the "I'm about to fall into the canyon" shot?

After visiting Arches and Canyonlands, the smart thing would have been to find a hotel in Moab, which is right by the two parks. Moab is a great little town, complete with a myriad of cute little restaurants and its own brewery. Moab would have been great. However, we didn't stay in Moab.

Looking at the map, we set our sights on the town of Blanding, Utah, which was an hour closer to our next destination of the Four Corners. We arrived in Blanding and found a hotel, and set our sights on finding a place to eat dinner. After a hot day walking around and seeing the sights under the Utah sun, all we wanted was to find a place where we could get dinner and an ice cold beer. We drove around to see what kind of eateries there were in Blanding, and both (yes, both -- as in, there were TWO) restaurants looked like they were alcohol-free. Curious as to where two visitors could get a refreshing drink we inquired at the local gas station, where we got the saddest news of the day: Blanding, Utah is a dry town.

At this point we had our hearts set on a beer... the idea had taken hold and we couldn't shake it. We found out that there was a gas station 3 miles outside of town that sells beer, so off we went. While browsing the beer case in the gas station, I saw this beer which made me actually laugh out loud:

Polygamy Porter... Why have just one!

No, we didn't actually buy the Polygamy Porter, but it was good for a chuckle!

Capitol Reef National Park

After the amazing drive from Bryce Canyon we entered Capitol Reef National Park, and the rainbow we had seen earlier was still going strong. We got to Capitol Reef within 90 minutes of sunset, which brilliantly lit up some of the red rock features of the park but also cast other areas in shadow. I focused mainly on the bright pictures!

There goes that rainbow again...

Rob and I are in the bottom of the picture for some size comparison; those cliffs are really high up!

No humans in this picture for size comparison, but trust me... these cliffsides are just as high as the ones in the previous picture.

We were in an extremely isolated part of Utah at this point. We ended up finding the town of Hanksville, Utah, population 206. 206! There are more than 206 teachers at my high school! So we found a room at the Hanksville Inn, run by a true character who told us his story of meeting Don Shanks (the guy who played Michael Myers in Halloween). Oh, Hanksville, you are just filled with interesting characters!