thai pizza? clayton
koi mural & window

update: all photos from the weekend are posted!

update: i can’t help but notice that pat’s photo is getting far more hits than any of my other photos. either this is from one person visiting many times (you know who you are), or a lot of people think pat’s hot. 🙂 it’s a toss-up i guess.

this weekend pat, jessie, lindsay and i planed or trained down to st. louis to have a mini-vacation with maria and nicole. it was awesome! the weather was INSANELY good. like spring! today it was 72 degrees!

pat, jessie and i flew out of midway on friday night. the flight was obscenely short – i think we were only in the air for about 40 minutes. lindsay had arrived in st. louis early in the afternoon. maria and nicole (and lindsay) picked us up at the airport and we went back to their apartments to regroup before going out; lindsay and i stayed with maria and clayton and pat and jessie stayed with nicole and matt.

that night we went to a bar in the loop called 609. it was fairly crowded though – no tables available. it was a neat-looking place though. they had a live dj, dance floor and hookahs. also, a lot of guys. i think i might’ve heard the phrase ‘sausage party’ bandied about; as soon as we walked in a bunch of heads shot around to size up the newcomers. creepy. anyway, we left to go to a different place we thought would be less crowded, but there was a line at that place and everyone was tired after traveling and/or working all day anyway. we went back to maria and clayton’s and watched some adult swim until everyone was ready to pass out. meanwhile at nicole’s, everyone was playing monopoly into the wee hours and making 3am taco bell runs.

saturday we met at 11:30 for lunch at fitz’s, a local root beer brewery and restaurant. i had a huge root beer float – sooo good! we went to the art museum (free!) and met up with a few of maria and nicole’s friends. i had texted pat mullen* earlier in the day to see if he was in st. louis or not and he was, so later on he also came to the museum! we walked around for over and hour then split ways with pat and maria and nicole’s college friends. we switched up cars so all the girls were in one car and all the boys in the other and headed to our next stop…

pat north entrance   hops model tankroom chandelier

the anheuser-busch brewery tour! it was really interesting! i wish we could’ve seen more. we saw the clydesdales, the aging tanks and some other huge brewery machinery. nicole and matt had been a few times so they made sure we were in the right positions to be the first on the trolleys back to the free beer. matt and pat were so excited about the free beer i thought they might stroke out. we enjoyed our 2 free beer samples then the girls went back to nicole’s so lindsay and i could see her apartment while the boys went to pick up some board games and (at matt’s insistence) beer. we reconvened at maria’s and spent the rest of the night eating pizza, watching ‘napoleon dynamite’, playing board games and in pat and matt’s case, getting incredibly drunk. trying to understand what matt was saying when he was slurring and stuttering his way through the trivial pursuit questions was bad enough, but trying to play taboo, a game that requires quick-thinking, was positively disasterous. 🙂 eventually everyone got tired or too wasted and nicole drove matt, pat and jessie home. we went to bed sometime around 2.

today we went downtown to union station. we ate at hard rock café and fed the giant koi in the lagoon. we walked lindsay to the amtrak station then everyone else drove back to nicole and matt’s to relax before heading to the airport.

it was a really great weekend – hopefully i’ll be able to spend some more time with maria and nicole this summer and there is talk of them coming up sometime in the spring!