Mansfield/St. Louis, Missouri, June 23, 2014 — Laura Ingalls Wilder had a refrigerator.
“Of course she had a refrigerator,” you say, “she died in 1957.” But do you think about the older woman writing the books, or do you think of the pioneer girl of the “Little House on the Prairie” series? The same girl who lived in various places in the still-mostly-untamed Midwest (including Iowa), reading by candlelight, eventually had a farmhouse on the edge of Mansfield, Missouri. Today, that house is open for tours and looks the way it was when she died, including the refrigerator in a little alcove built specifically for it.
That was my first stop of the day, and it lasted the whole morning, taking in tours of both the farmhouse and the Rock House, which was a gift from her daughter and the place Wilder started writing the books.
Wilder monument in downtown Mansfield
While the day started out very nice, rain would come on and off after that. I pulled off to eat in Winona just in time to watch a deluge out the Subway window. US 60 is four lanes all the way from Springfield to Sikeston. I swung through Poplar Bluff, where at the northwest corner of town both US 60 and US 67 exit from themselves at a cloverleaf interchange, but decided against going down to US 160’s new east end because of the rain.
Once isolated in southern Missouri, Poplar Bluff now has four-lane connections to I-44, I-55, and I-57. The US 67 bypass opened in June 2001.
In Sikeston there is the triple-sequential intersection of US 60, 61, and 62, and I followed 61 north to Jackson. Jackson, not Cape Girardeau, is the county seat. I followed I-55 for a while, then got back on 61 through Ste. Genevieve, in a far different climate than the first time I’d been through (blizzard conditions on the way to the Liberty Bowl).
This bridge at Cape Girardeau, which opened Dec. 13, 2003, is the second highway bridge across the Mississippi River south of St. Louis.
Finally, I stopped on the south side of St. Louis, at one of those old, sprawling Holiday Inns that you can get lost in easily, and used a coupon from a travel book picked up on I-55.