Farewell, urban living: Leaving Kansas City, in the last traffic jam we'd see for a good long while.

St. Joe, Mo.: A surprisingly gritty industrial look for a smallish city on the Missouri-Kansas border.

Small town: Mound City, Missouri. Good thing we didn't stick out there or anything.

Looking out for the customer: Mound City's market subscribes to the "No Shoes, No Service" school of grocery-store management, but not for the usual reasons.

More urban revitalization: One of the many rehabbed warehouse buildings in the revitalized Haymarket District in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Time travel: Not only does this hallway lead to the bathrooms, it takes you to 1957.

Lunch: Not sure we'd ever have envisioned ourselves eating al fresco at Buzzard Billy's in Lincoln.

Disney's Warehouse District: More Haymarket.

Dried up: We zigzagged across the Missouri many times during this trip, and the extreme drought conditions were clearly visible.

Steak-eriffic: Since this was the "Cemeteries, Casinos, and Steaks Across America" tour, we figured it was time to start digging into some beef; Dreisbach's is a touchstone of Bill's youth.

Not quite boutique: The Grand Island Travelodge, for all your cheapskate lodging needs. But at least it was right next to the water park, where we were the only grown-ups splashing around who weren't parents.

The Rag: How could we not immortalize this?