Road Trip Days 2 and 3

We spent days 2 and 3 in St. Louis. Tuesday Morning, after heading to the local St. Louis Bread Company (aka Panera) and researching cheap things to do in St. Louis, we decided a trip to the zoo was in order. The zoo in general was pretty nice (especially for a free zoo), but the highlight was absolutely the penguin house. It was a climate-controlled building that must have had close to 100 penguins (of several types), many of which were within reach (which meant really testing my self restraint to not just reach out and pick one up).

After the zoo, we headed to Busch Stadium a bit early to walk around and catch batting practice. We ended up with seats in the left field bleachers and spent some time watching the Giants take BP, and marveling at Brian Wilson’s beard as he jogged in the outfield. Chris Carpenter gave new meaning to the phrase “laboring” as he seemed to take several minutes between every pitch, leading to a rather slow and plodding game. However, the weather was great and it was a beautiful night for some baseball.

Wednesday entailed more free entertainment during the day. We checked out the Missouri History Museum in the afternoon. There was a several room big exhibit on Charles Lindbergh that was really interesting. The rest of the museum didn’t really hold my interest, but the Lindbergh part was more than worth the cost of admission. We had some time to kill before the game, so we headed to a coffee shop that we had visited the day before and killed some time on our computers. At about 5:45, the guy working informed us that they had actually closed at 5:00 but we weren’t in the way, so he had let us just hang out. At this point, I was appreciative of the nice gesture and enjoying the fact that sometimes people just do something nice. However, coffee shop guy was just the warm-up act of nice St. Louisans.

We arrived at Busch stadium, and while we were waiting in line to pick up tickets for the night’s game, a guy walking by approached us to ask if we were looking for 2 tickets and proceeded to just give us 2 extras that he had. Apparently he was a season ticket holder and had a couple extras, so we ended up sitting in $43 seats for free. The game again featured gorgeous weather, but this time we had the added bonus of getting to watch Tim Lincecum pitch. From our seats on the third base side of the diamond, we had a great view at his delivery and both Karl and I relished seeing Lincecum face Pujols 3 times, an uncommon site to AL viewers. The game went to extras, and we ended up leaving before the end (so as not to keep my grandma up too late waiting for us). Just minutes after we left the park, a bank of lights went out leading to a 15 or so minute delay, so our timing leaving was probably good.

Choosing a song to accompany this post wasn't easy. I had several possibilities, but I'm going to go with one to honor a player with one of the laziest nicknames (that is still kind of awesome) in baseball, Ryan "The Riot" Theriot. He picked up 3 hits between the 2 games we saw. I was hoping he would get a walk-off hit or something to make his contributions more notable, but he refused to cooperate. Anyhow, here is a live performance of "Take Me To The Riot" by Stars. Enjoy!



This morning, we hit the road on our way to Cincinnati. I’ll recap that part of the trip tomorrow or Saturday most likely.