Meet me in St. Louis (Part 1)
I spent this last weekend in St. Louis, MO. My wife and I had two main purposes for making this trip. The first was to see my friend Kate get married. The other, was to have our season passes to Six Flags validated. We are taking a trip to Six Flags Fiesta Texas in June, and we needed to use our passes at St. Louis first otherwise they wouldn't work at other parks. Otherwise we had no real plans for the weekend. We had talked about taking a ride on the Gateway Arch or seeing a Cardinals game, but neither become a reality.
One of the first things I learned on this trip is that I can no longer drive straight through to St. Louis. When I was younger I had no problem doing so, but now I start to falling asleep at the wheel after about 3 hours. That made the last hour of the trip into St. Louis go by slow, especially since my wife was asleep most of that time. About five miles from our exit my wife woke up and I had her take over navigating duties. It was about 4PM on a Friday so commuter traffic was starting to pick up and there was a Cards game that night. What happened next I partially blame my wife and partially the directions we had. We took our ext, my wife pointed out our hotel, and I took the three required rights on one-way streets to get to the Hyatt next to the Arch. We first tried to use the self-parking lot, and soon found not only the size of the garage small. After making a couple rounds we retreated back the entrance to tell the attendant that there were not spaces available. We were told we needed to go back to the entrance and use valet parking (which of course had open spaces at $26 a day). I re-navigated the maze of one-way streets to get back to the entrance. We had the valet park our car and proceeded to check-in. After waiting in a line for about 15 minutes we go to the desk only to find out our reservation was at the Hilton, and not the Hyatt. I was exhausted and beyond mad. While we waited for the valet to retrieve our car I cursed my wife up and down for A) not realizing she directed me to the wrong hotel since she had our reservation confirmation in her hand the entire time, and B) not being able to read directions. When we got our car it turned out that the directions I had printed off from the Hilton's site were incorrect and left out the final turn for the hotel. However, this did not negate the fact that my wife had read our reservation wrong.
Once we were settled at the hotel we decided to kill some time and walked around the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial park (the area around the Arch), and walked around downtown. We knew rain was coming, but just kept an eye on the sky. We wanting to get a feel for what kinds of restaurants and entertainment was available within walking distance. When we started to smell the rain and saw that the sky had turned green we headed back to the hotel. Just as we got back the sky opened up. Perfect timing!
We spent the rest of the night flipping back and forth between the Cards game and other drivel on TV. The next morning we went to my friend's wedding at 11am. It was a little long at an hour and fifteen minutes, but it was a Catholic ceremony so that wasn't unexpected. As long as it was, it did go by fast and the church she got married in was covered in stained glass. No decorating was required in this 175 year old church. After the wedding we went back to the hotel and decided to once again walk around downtown since we needing to kill time until the reception which was at 5:30pm. This time I made Valerie stop by Busch Stadium so I could take some pictures. I like the idea of a downtown stadium, but after I talked to residents they think it is kind of a pain. Parking and traffic are a nightmare, and most people take shuttles in. Compared to the Royals' own Kauffman Stadium I think the exterior is nicer, but the seating looked like there might be some bad views in the upper deck. It's also the only other Major League Baseball stadium I had seen in person so I don't have a lot to compare it to either.
Once we were done walking around we made our way back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding reception. However, the details on that are going to have to wait for another post.
