Road Trippin' USA

So we drove from Cincinnati, plowing through the distance intending to get there in mid-evening and see the Arch, wander around the city, and see what else there was to do there–maybe stay over night if we found something fun to do.

Entering St Louis

HAH!  That’s a laugh in retrospect.  I had been checking online and it was clear from their website that the Arch was open–no risk of it being shut down on the 5th of July even though the Federal Government had the day off.  So we drove into town, found a place to park surprisingly close to the Arch, and headed on over to make sure the timing was still good.  According to the website it closed at 10pm and we wanted to go up the arch a little before sundown so we could get that perspective of the view.

Arch Underneath Perspective

We joked about taking the stairs, and I did not joke about the fact that I probably would die if I tried considering how out of shape I was.

We started walking to find some food since we were planning on doing the Arch a bit later, and found it awfully strange how deserted the whole place felt.  We walked for about 7 blocks, using Urban Spoon as a guide towards a decent restaurant, but really we were searching for any restaurant that was open.  Apparently the entire downtown city area was closed.  No restaurants were open.  No stores were open.

The only people we ran into was a family of tourists who were looking for a place to eat as well.  Nope, sorry guys.  No food in St. Louis.  We did backtrack to a TGIF that was open–no one wanted to eat there as we passed it, but we figured there weren’t a whole lot of other options at that point.  We were all starting to get really hungry at that point anyway.

Things didn’t get a whole lot better from there.  There was a deal online that I found that sounded appealing, and our server shot it down without even checking.  It took a really long time to get our food, and Chad’s ribs were basically destroyed–burnt to a crisp.  The server took Chad’s entire plate (taking the Shrimp, fries, and miscellaneous other tasty morsels) away from him in the process leaving him sad and hungry.  Didn’t refill waters.  The table next to us was discussing the waiter’s personality as well and they nailed it–the dude was creepy.  Like he was trying really hard to seem caring–creepily, but through his actions really not all that caring.  The dude at the other table was like “I usually tip 15% or more but I really don’t want to encourage him”.  We didn’t want to encourage him either–some of us more so than others.  Plus he was a dude, and there were no attractive waitresses.  So not helpful for picture-taking!  St Louis TGIF=FAIL.

Once we got back over to the Arch, we took some pictures of the Arch and headed over to the Arch Museum entrance.

As we were walking down, we noticed a guard holding a sign that said that the elevators were not operating July 5th.  We asked him to confirm and he said the Arch was shut down the whole day.

Yes.  That’s right.  They shut down the main attraction and our main reason for being in St. Louis.

Since they wouldn’t even let Chad into the Museum/Shop underground at the Arch due to the slightly-over-standard length of his knife blade (apparently 4-inches is the limit and his was 4 1/2 inches, we said fuck it and left.

St Louis = FAIL

On the plus side, my burger was tasty.

Burger = WIN!

As it turned out, we stopped by a bowling alley/bar and rolled a game.  Everyone but Max rolled pretty well and I wish I still had the score as a record. Haha.  We flirted a bit with the hostess and one of the waitresses, and again Max set me up with the hostess to have our picture taken together.  She seemed rather shy/surprised about how to deal with our group (especially with our incompetence with cameras), but she handled herself with a fair amount of grace.

Hostess at Bowling Alley in Kentucky

In between frames while in the bathroom, I ran into a guy who was from Cincinnati who started telling me about the place we were at.  He shared that he had been in the Navy for 20-some years, told me about the building down the street where the Thompson machine gun (Tommy gun) was invented, pointed out and explained the best place for picking up chicks outside on the patio, and showed me the mechanical bull they had in the back.  I’m pretty sure my thumbs are still fractured from the last couple times I rode a mechanical bull first at McFadden’s and Union Jacks in DC.

I made it back to the lane to find a round of Ketel One shots waiting which they had turned into doubles for us.  I’ve had Ketel One Vodka before, but it was probably the best shot I’ve had in a long time.  After another round of flirting with the waitress and hostess, we got on our way to the house party Max’s friend was hosting at her house in Kentucky.

When we arrived, the party-goers at the house were already pretty sloshed, but we got inside, investigated our way to the stash of hard liquor (the motherlode), and had a good time talking to Taylor (one of the airsoft participants from the previous day) and his wife.  We also talked to some other interesting characters at the party–Zach, a wasted politico who strongly believed that the Capitol should not be a state due to favoritism; Rory, an aspiring filmmaker, and Becka, who managed to get all of our names right after concerted effort on her part.

We also saw Susan there, one of Max’s friends whom we had met at BDubs the night before.  She was playing with a very cute energetic tabby kitten on the carpet and so I joined her and we explored our love of cats, discussed programming and soccer.

After a couple hours, getting some amusing video of some of the folks there [Party in Kentucky], we said our goodbyes, including the naked dude and everyone else in the portable pool, and Dave drove us out.  Someone had a brilliant idea, and we stopped at McDonalds on the way back hoping to absorb some of the alcohol we had consumed.  Dave, our voluntary DD for this leg of the trip, again delivered us safely back home.

We woke up around 11am on Sunday, July 4th, feeling a bit groggy from the night before.  We had a great time, drank a lot of beers, ate some tasty wings, watched the UFC action, and got to meet a couple of Max’s friends.  After watching some more highlight reels of John ‘Bones’ Jones, we got moving for breakfast and made it to Cracker Barrel.  It took a while to get the food but it was plentiful and tasty.

That's some serious breakfast right there.

During breakfast we discussed what to do about sharing the exploits of our trip–including a documentation of the attractive girls we were certainly to come across along the way.

Max decided it was a good idea for me to get a picture with the hottest waitress that served us in each state we went through.  I couldn’t really deny that it was a brilliant idea.  After all, as it was already determined, “Every adventure needs a hot girl”.  With that decided, we paid our bill and were on to our next stop in Cincinnati.

That next stop was to be a gun store/shooting range, where we wandered the aisles as Max found the proper archery equipment he was looking for.  While we were there, I thought it was interesting that the guy at the counter asked a group of dark-skinned Indian/Persian folks if they were American citizens.  As he explained to them, they can not sell ammunition, weapons, or allow them to rent weapons for the shooting range.  And so they opted for archery.

We left the store after doing a little video survey of the weapons available, and headed to Max’s work at GE so he could pick up some papers he needed.  Unfortunately we had to stay in the car due to it being a secured secret facility.

We soon headed back home and started playing Settlers and watching Aliens.  Max and I introduced Dave and Chad to playing Settlers of Catan, and had our first game–it was fairly close but I managed to pull out a win.  Dave impressed me by picking up some of the more advanced game concepts very quickly and doing quite well for his first time.

All hail the Lord of Catan!

We played again and I decided to take a big gamble–picking a 3:1 port spot and having a limited number set. I stated openly that if 8s or 10s were rolled at all I’d be fine, otherwise I was pretty well fucked.  Naturally, 6s and 4s were the plentiful ones and 8s and 10s were only rolled a few times each the entire game, so I just rolled and passed the dice each turn, resigned to my fate.  I think I ended with 4 points. Aliens is a good movie.  Sigh.

Game Over, Man! Game Over!

Max’s parents stopped by briefly while we were playing.  They were both very nice and wished us well on our trip.

Following the previous night of airsoft, Max had planned to do another round of airsoft the next day in his friend James’ backyard.

The morning soon came and we got moving to James’ place after a bit of groggy preparation.  We had met James during the previous night’s airsoft session and I had borrowed a couple of his weapons to try.  We stopped at mcdonalds along the way, and we all felt a bit better and energized with a little breakfast in us. Mmm Mmm breakfast burritos.

Breakfast of Champions

We arrived at James’ house, which has a several-acre-large backyard consisting of a main path leading down a large hill, across a stream running perpendicular at the bottom, and back up the next hill leading to a fire pit.

In all directions, scattered trees and bushes, the remnants of fallen trees, and other miscellaneous foresty things.
We ended up having 7 people to start, until another friend came and we had 4v4.

We played a few rounds, with one team defending, and one team assaulting, and then a ‘downed pilot’ scenario, where it was our job to find and rescue our downed pilot and escort him safely to the helipad.  After a futile search, we were eliminated before we found the pilot, so we lost.

After the airsoft, we hung out for a while and practiced shooting real weapons–Chad’s .45 (USP), and Rick (one of Max’s friends) had his own 1911. After quite a bit of shooting–totally mangling the metal target frame someone had brought, we headed back.

Having assigned zones of coverage as we advanced, we found ourselves skirting around the edges, only vaguely able to tell that combat had initiated closer to the center of the play area.  The field was more like a series of hedge-row-like-bundles of brush and trees that broke navigation and visibility into fairly narrow corridors.

The playing area also included a small pond near the center of play, and periodically we would hear a murmuring, or groan, coming from somewhere in the brush.  We figured that it was likely either a bullfrog or a duck or something, but since it was a public park area, one of the girls thought for sure it was a hobo and got scared and went back to the starting area.

It's easy to confuse frogs for hobos.

Braving the darkness and odd noises, the three of us went on, occasionally stopping to listen and issue directives.  Once our squad moved closer to the center of the playing area, and since it was nearly pitch-black, we decided to lay in wait and set an ambush.

The rest of the night involved many such actions–moving stealthily through the darkness, discerning where enemies were coming from, and then laying in wait, executing those who strayed into our zones of fire.  We played a couple more rounds, each time setting a different scenario and different squads.  As much fun as rolling around on the ground firing guns akimbo is, I quickly opted to use a heavier, double-magazine L85 assault rifle.

Confirmed: Better than dual pistols.

Using this weapon definitely made me feel a bit more able to eliminate the enemy and in the next couple rounds I did manage to get a few ‘kills’.

Unfortunately, for the first couple rounds Chad was having problems telling the difference between yellow and green colored glowsticks of the two teams.  In the first round apparently he lit up his own teammates, and then in the second round, he let me and my squad walk right by him as he lay in wait for an ambush. In frustration, understandably, he sat out the last round.  Besides the issue of vision though, all in all a fun time, and we knew there would be more action in the daylight the next day…