There are times on a road trip when it helps to skip a step.  To hop on a plane rather than drive thousands of miles.  So, though our original idea was to do a circular route from Chicago, somewhere along the way, we thought it would be good to explore that bit further by means of adding a flight into the formula.

So early this morning, we were at Minneapolis Lindbergh terminal boarding a small plane, first to Chicago (59 mins) and connecting to an even smaller plane to Little Rock (1hr 35min). 

It took us all day.

Leaving Minneapolis, the views were rather good.  Minnesota isn’t called “the land of 10 000 lakes” for nothing.

Sitting waiting for the connecting flight, I looked at the names of the standby passengers and thought how strange it was that they all had Chinese names…that was just before I realised that the list showed just the first three letters of each surname.  Duh!

It was a pretty cloudy ride this time and there wasn’t much to see, sadly.

Though as we came into land, we flew low over the Arkansas River and caught a good look at the downtown skyline.

We collected our rental car (yay!  this one doesn’t smell of curry inside!!)  and found our way to the River Market area, where our hotel is situated.

My hero and I scored our 41st state here, too!