Goin' to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come

This morning we woke up at the crack of dawn (literally--I set the alarm wrong and I was in the shower already before either of us realized it was only 6 a.m.) and headed towards St. Louis, Missouri. Just outside of St. Louis is the tiny town of Collinsville, Illinois, home of the World's Largest Catsup bottle. That's right folks. The bottle itself is about forty feet tall, plus it stands on top of a tower several stories high. You drive through this tiny little idyllic neighborhood, go up a hill and as you go over, the bottle simply appears before you, looking at first like it is hovering over the trees. It stands over a former ketchup plant. We jumped out, took pictures, and then jumped back onto the road again to race to the next attraction, Cahokia Mounds.
I accidentally spotted the Indian Mound site on the atlas and mentioned it to Joe, who had no idea what I meant by Indian Mounds, so we decided to go. It turns out that one of the mounds there, Monk's Mound, is the largest man-made earth contruction on this continent--even larger than mounds in Mexico. Cahokia was still a city of thousands of people in 1200 AD and the chief lived on top of Monk's Mound, which covers over 14 acres and is over 100 feet high. In the nearby burial mounds, archaeologists have excavated hundreds of bodies. It was very cool, but blisteringly hot, so we didn't actually climb Monk's Mound.
We pressed on into St. Louis where traffic was nasty. We had 2 possible food destinations: Ted Drewes frozen custard and C & K BBQ. We decided to go for custard first, since it was a little out of the way and BBQ would be on our way out of the city. The custard was amazing. It is located on the old Route 66, so they get a lot of attention, but they live up to it. I got a Cardinal Sin Sundae--vanilla custard, hot fudge and tart cherries, while Joe got a Hawaiian concrete--vanilla custard, pineapple, coconut, and macademia nuts blended into a mixture so thick that they hand it to you upside down for effect. There was nowhere to sit that wasn't in the sun, so we stood off to the side of the order window and devoured them in minutes. Even then we couldn't keep up with the melting. We seem to be following the heat wave.
Traffic had put us behind schedule, so we decided to forego St. Louis BBQ for lunch to be sure we didn't miss Kansas City BBQ for dinner. We made the right decision. Arthur Bryant's BBQ is the most famous BBQ in the country. It's in the warehouse district and is such a run-down plastic-chair kind of place that I wouldn't have even looked twice at it. Until I smelled it. We had a pulled pork sandwich, ribs, ham, baked beans, fries and a red cream soda. My favorite was the pulled pork, though I wasn't blown away by the ribs. I've had better. Same with the fries. But the rest of the meal made up for it. The ham was amazing. It was piled on white bread and it's perfect to dump their famous sauce all over. The restaurant was filled mostly with families and good-ole-boys, who sometimes sat down with more than one platter plus a pint of beans on the side.
We're relaxing in a cheap hotel now, waiting for it to cool off enough to swim in the outdoor pool--the first time we'll have spent more than 8 hours at a hotel. Today was an amazing day, the best of the trip so far. Tomorrow we head into Kansas.