Road trip is going well so far… just a quick recap (and some pictures … just a sampling, I’ll get more up later):
Headed out Tuesday morning and traveled in the opposite direction of everyone heading into Chicago… no traffic problems at all. Smooth sailing all the way into Iowa. The winds picked up and it rained a bit, but it wasn’t a bad ride… stopped for gas outside Des Moines and almost got blown away by the winds. We got some Culvers before leaving Iowa, and the lined up a dinner meeting with Sarah’s friend Denise, once we got to Missouri. It was at a bar called Sheriff’s, just a bit south of Kansas city, that was a little scary on the outside, but ok on the inside. They put bacon in their quesadillas, so they were ok in our book. When we were done eating and chatting, we headed up to Emily’s house in Liberty, MO. It’s a great little house and we were treated as very special guests. After some catching up, camera talk, computer talk, real estate talk, etc., we went to bed and slept in until it was almost afternoon.
We had brunch at this lovely little bruncheonette, called Ginger Sue’s. I got French Toast (made with French Bread), which was delicious. Emily took us for a mini-tour of Kansas City, mostly in her Mini, though we did get out to tour the giant sculptures outside the Nelson-Atkins museum and to get some sandwiches at Arthur Bryants BBQ. We were still pretty stuffed from brunch, so we brought our large bundle of meat, bread, fries and pickles with us as we hit the road towards St Louis. We arrived at our hotel and found their microwave, heated up our food, attempted to digest it and went to bed.
This morning, we got up and stole some continental breakfast and headed into St Louis. We headed directly for the Arch, because I’ve never seen it and had no idea that you could go inside it. We had to buy tickets for the ride to the top about two hours out, though, so we hung around underneath the arch for a while. The have a museum down there dedicated to the westward expansion of the US… since that’s what the arch is about. The exhibits are cool, there’s even an animatronic native american, which I found a little amusing. The really neat part about most of the museum is that almost the entire place is arranged in concentric circles (or arches, I guess) through the decades of US history… so, all the way across the whole room, you have artifacts and stories from a certain decade. I guess it was just another implementation of the arch concept, but I found it very interesting, especially as a museum layout. We finally got up to the top and hung out long enough to satisfy our “we’re really high up, let’s take pictures” urges and then headed back down. It was pretty awesome, and I got some fun pictures. Once we were outside, Sarah’s mom called with a dinner suggestion, since a local restaurant had been good enough to get a review in a Chicago paper. It was just on the other side of the parking lot we were in, so we walked over to it. The riverfront district that it was in had a nice charm to it, with the cobblestone roads and the classic brick buildings. We were heading to a place called Hannegan’s. and its front door was open, despite the cold snap, so it was pretty inviting, right from the get-go. The staff jumped up, all smiles, as soon as we walked in. We got seated at a very comfy booth and started going through the menu. Sarah’s mom had already clued me in on the fact that they had toasted ravioli, which is an old favorite of mine, and that they had a blackberry dessert that Sarah would probably dig… but the rest of the menu sounded so good that we both had a hard time deciding. We finally went with a couple sandwiches and shared half of each with each other. There was a very yummy chicken club and a high-piled turkey (with apple slices), both on ciabatta, and both with a mound of absolutely perfectly cooked french fries. Sarah got her blackberry dessert, which was a pastry thing filled with ice cream and a bunch of warm blackberries and raspberries. I got something called a Tuxedo Truffle Mousse, which included Marble cake, chocolate mousse and white chocolate mouse… it was a big rich cube of yumminess. We decided that the place was pretty close to perfect. On the way home, we hoped to find a mall with a Ritz or something in it, so we could get some halfway decent film for tomorrow, but we couldn’t… we did find a movie theater, though, with a bit of difficulty, since the road didn’t quite exist on the GPS. We saw Blades of Glory, which was pretty hilarious. Even with such big and striking characters as Will Ferrel and Jon Heder were, we both felt that Nick Swardson stole the movie with his scenes… and now we’re back at our hotel, ready for bed and checking out in the morning.
Tomorrow’s plan is big, including the City Museum, a restaurant where they throw food at you and the beginning of the journey back to Chicago… but only about an hour north of St Louis to our next hotel.
. We were also waiting for the 
DVD to come out, and now we’ve got it pre-ordered at Amazon. I’ve learned to love Amazon. I used to boycott them, when they were still trying to enforce their patent on cookies (via the one-click shopping patent). Hopefully they won’t abuse the 
for the first time, and I think a couple other Robert Rodriguez flicks are in my queue. Saw Pirates 3 as well: not bad, but was lacking the cleverness of the first and the crazy chase scenes of the second.
. I keep dying in the flopside pit of 100 trials… got all the way to the end last time and freaked out at the boss battle and messed up.
