Carson Gee

I’m back to the grind after an amazing Thanksgiving holiday weekend.  It was probably the best holiday I’ve had.  There were mad amounts of good food, driving, exploration, and the best kind of company.  It all started with a non-traditional cooking extravaganza on Thanksgiving day and ended with a trip to St. Louis.

There was only two people to cook for on Thursday, so we decided to go a bit abnormal with a chicken dinner instead of turkey or ham.  We have wanted to do beer can chicken for a while now, and what better excuse than “turkey day”.  We decided to use Tallgrass’ Buffalo Sweat since that is the best canned beer we could find, and we figured the dark nature would add a lot to the chicken.  We also decided to use a different rub on each bird to maximize the chance of at least one four pound chicken ending up tasty—as for why we had two birds, well Deena thought one wouldn’t be enough .  The results were incredible, and we ended up with two amazing moist and tender chickens with meat falling off the bone.

After that amazing food and the resulting calorie coma, it was off to St. Louis on Friday.  One of the better ideas I’ve had lately is to go on a day trip at least once a month.  We are always so busy, and our time in the Midwest is hopefully short, so reserving one day a month to get out of town and explore the area has been a great way to get out and spend some much needed time together.  November is our third month since we’ve started doing these monthly getaways and it also happens to be the largest time off we get together all year thanks to school and work. So we decided to plan an overnight trip to St. Louis.

One of the most unexpected treats of the trip was getting to St. Louis.  I’ve never driven across the great state of Missouri, and boy was that an experience.  Although we were scared to actually stop anywhere between Kansas City and St. Louis proper, we greatly enjoyed all of the mid state “destinations”.  Between the myriad of year round fireworks stands, we saw what is possibly my favorite business ever.  The strip joint/adult video store/arcade:

Once we arrived in St. Louis it was time to play and explore.  I’ve been hearing about the City Museum for years, and we were very excited to see what it was all about—turns out awesome is what.  From a design, art, and engineering perspective, it is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced.  The combination of beauty, insanity, and functionality absolutely blew me away.  Ok, adult hat off.  It was FUN.  A 10 story slide, kids popping out from all over the place, never a few feet without something to climb on or slide down.  It was a blast.  No, we don’t have any kids, but while we were there we became children.  It took a while for the transformation to take place, but once it did, it was complete and hard to come back from.

After we had finished exploring every tunnel we could fit into, it was time to get some grub and check into the hotel.  Thanks to a handy smart phone, finding grub was easy and we ended up deciding to eat at Rosalita’s Cantina.  The food was delicious (although nowhere near our preferred Mexican restaurant in Lawrence), and the atmosphere was cool.  It felt a bit strange as it was setup like halfway between a nightclub and a restaurant, but overall it was a decent place.

After checking into the hotel, we just passed out.  Between the drive and being monkeys for several hours, it was just time to throw in the towel and hope to regroup for the next day.  The following morning we followed Google’s directions to the Arch.  We were kind of thinking the big giant tourist attraction Arch, but Google thought 1 University Ln was the arch we wanted.  We dutifully followed our directions even though we were driving west, and the giant arch was visible to the east of us.  But hey, trust in the mighty.  On the plus side of this 20 minute detour, we accidentally ended up at a White Castle, which happened to be one of our primary destinations (so greasy, oniony, delicious).  So no foul, but if you are headed to St. Louis to see the giant arch tell Google you are headed to the “Gateway Arch” not “the Arch” or “Arch”.

We really enjoyed the Arch once we made it there.  It was halfway between aw and sadness for me.  Aw in that we could engineer and build something that is seemingly ready to topple thanks to beauty of the geometric shape, and sadness at the amount of resources that could have been better spent.  We ended up choosing not to go up to the top because it didn’t really seem like that cool of a thing to do, and we really didn’t feel like getting scanned and taking off all our winter clothes in freezing weather.

After that we wandered around the area and ended up playing some penny slots in a nearby casino for a few hours before heading back.  All in all it was great trip filled with adventure and fun.  I don’t think I’ll ever go back to St. Louis by choice, but it was a nice overnight vacation.

To see the rest of the trip head on over to the Flickr album of all our photos.