Looking for leaves

Our leaves are rapidly changing to their autumn colors, and I needed a road trip.  I saw somewhere on the web that this was the peak time to visit Lake of the Ozarks to see the beauty of the changing leaves.  Then I stumbled on another site entitled 6 Fabulous Fall Drives in Missouri and read through the various places.  Cliff doesn't enjoy road trips as much as I do, so I decided to choose a trip that would begin in the town where he was born:  Versailles, Missouri.  His mother had her first four children at home.  Of course there's nothing new to us about the journey to Versailles, since we visited his aunts and uncles often.  We've tried every road you can use to get from our home to Versailles, especially when we were riding our Honda Goldwing.  Motorcycles are made for riding the backroads.  

At Versailles, the leaves were pretty much like ours at home, but I figured maybe they'd be more colorful when we got to the lake.  I wanted to end our trip at the Ha Ha Tonka Missouri State Park.  It's been a long time since we were down there on the motorcycle.  The ruins of the old castle are on a steep hill, and Cliff wouldn't have been able to breath by the time he got halfway there.  So he waited in the car while I took some pictures.  When we were there in 2011, people could walk around in the ruins, but now there's a fence around it.

The view from the castle yesterday

You can find the sad, entire story of Ha Ha Tonka HERE.

As you can see, the autumn colors at Ha Ha Tonka aren't at their best yet.  

In fact, I took the following picture from my backyard when we got home.  You can read the entire story of the place throughout my  blog.  (Ha Ha Woodhaven)  

We ate at Volkers Pub and Eatery in Sedalia; I had a delicious Pub Reuben sandwich, and Cliff had a salad.  We don't eat out a lot, so the shock of paying $14 for a sandwich, and another $10 for a salad, was a reminder of what inflation is doing.  With the tip, it cost over thirty bucks.  At least my Reuben was unique and not something I could probably imitate at home, so there's that.  And I got loaded kettle chips free with my sandwich; I shared them with Cliff, and we both liked them.