Our trip to St Louis was fantastic. There was almost as much driving time as time spent there, but we threw a great plan together at the last minute, and stuck to it, and it was great. We checked in around 3 and then headed downtown and directly to the yummy place in the riverfront district that we liked so much from our last visit to St Louis, Hannegan’s. It was delicious… again. The toasted raviolis were super yummy, their fries were amazing and the dessert was as great as I remembered.
From there, we headed right over to City Museum and got a parking spot so close that there was an airplane visible through the sunroof. The party was mostly chaos, but it was definitely a good time. The place is really amazing. It was mostly teenagers and older, so we didn’t have to watch little kids crawl through all the tight spots and feel super jealous. There was free Monster energy drinks (which, after two sips, I decided are too gross for consumption) available the whole time that we were there and some other free foods became available later, but we were still pretty full from Hannegan’s. We could’ve used some water or something, but that wasn’t an option. Free admission and free food and free generic sodas is pretty good, though. I did buy a Ball Pit shirt, because mine smelled funny. We took a lot of pictures. I experimented with my new semi fish eye for the first time. I posted a bunch.
After a few hours, we took off and got some much needed rest at our hotel. The bathroom door(s) were like closet doors, with no lock. It was strange, but otherwise, the hotel was ok. We watched the silver surfer movie when it came on HBO and I think it might’ve been worse than the first fantastic 4 movie, which is saying a lot.
In the morning, we headed back downtown to get breakfast at a place called Rooster. We chose it based on Yelp ratings. I should really go review it (and Hannegan’s and City Museum), but I think I’ll save that for the morning. I had a Finnish Pancake and it was really delicious… Sarah got monstrous crepe filled with egg and bacon and Vermont Cheddar cheese. I tried some, it was awesome. She also got a side of Breakfast Potatoes of which I probably ate the most. They had a little hot pepper or something on them and it was really delicious.
We started home from there, stopping at every antique mall that we saw along the way and a restaurant that Sarah’s mom frequented when she was in school called Avanti’s, in Normal, IL. The antiques were fun, the food was decent and we missed all the bad Chicago traffic.
Gotta prepare a little for next week’s trip to Seattle, but it was great to get out of town for a day or two. It really makes me look forward to the longer trip.
And now, the sleep.
Cookie week has come to a close. The cookies are being packed into boxes to be sent to friends and family across the country. I need to bring them to the post office tomorrow, after work, I guess, and get them all in the mail. Round three included chocolate covered pretzel rods, in white and semi-sweet chocolate, with lots of fun decorations like itty bitty snowflakes and candy cane pieces, icing and putting sparkly sugar on the gingerbread snowflakes and the chocolate and almond slivers to finish off the Czech bear paws. The bear paws only called for a little bit of choclate, but we decided that more chocolate is always better. They turned out adorable and delicious. It was a mostly decorative day and quite a fun one. I put more pictures up yesterday and today, and you can see all of Sarah’s pics together with mine, since we tagged them all 
). Got another Adventure Ed overnight this week (and next week). There’s pictures from last week’s trip on the 
. 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 
woot