A New Wander, Days 4 and 5, but not 6: St Louis

  This is part four of many. You really should read them in order. You'll find Part One here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip. 

Friday, June 23:

The Best Breakfast in Farmington, Missouri, according to whatever web sites I checked, is at the Factory Cafe, which has two locations: one out on the highway and one downtown. I picked the one downtown. It's located in an old factory building, along with a number of other shops. It did have excellent food and good prices, though the service could have easily been better. 

 It was then only about an hour and a half to St Louis. Since I'd decided the night before not to set my usual 6AM alarm for that reason (why bother?) and had slept until 7:30, then had a leisurely breakfast, we didn't get into the city until after noon. We made the Third Degree Glass Studio our first stop; when I visited here a few years ago with my friend Marty, I found it had some novel and inspired works of unusual quality. This time, not so much. There was still the quality, but almost everything had a derivative quality about its design, and the colour choices of the various artists fell only into two categories: mundane and garish. After a good look around the gallery, we had a pleasant lunch at Blueberry Hill. So, that was two boxes ticked. That left us with a few hours to kill in the city before we headed across the river into Illinois, where our hotel is.

1931 Chrysler Imperial

 Roland has no notion of what there is to do or see in St Louis, and seems to have no ambition in that regard; so I decided to go to the St Louis Car Museum and Sales Company, about ten minutes west of the Delmar Loop. It's a big warehouse-like space where individuals who own special cars can have them stored in a climate-controlled environment, and offered for sale if they desire. The paltry entrance fees for gawkers like me (Roland waited patiently for me in the lobby) only help defray some of the costs of keeping the cars for their owners. More than half the cars on display were for sale. A couple were reserved for pending sale; others were just being stored.

 With the exception of one ragged-looking 1960 Volkswagen Beetle that seemed to have been fresh from the barn, all the cars there are in excellent shape. Many of them were of no great interest to me: muscle cars such as I've seen over and over in fifty other places (including on the street). And while I love certain muscle cars -- certain Chevy Malibus and Pontiac Grand Prix and GTOs -- I no longer get excited by them. Commonplace classics like '55, '56 and '57 Chevies. The kind of angular supercars that titillate the twits on the old Top Gear series, Lamborghinis and Ferraris and later-model Corvettes: Lambos have always been ugly; Ferrari makes mostly ugly cars, though with some stunning exceptions; and Vettes haven't really been pretty since the third generation was discontinued in 1984; each one since (4th through 8th, so far) has gotten progressively uglier. 

 There are lots of mid-engined sports cars with poorly balanced proportions, like Audi R8's and Porsche Cayennes on display; and ubiquitous models like Porsche 911s. Seen one, seen 'em all, or don't care because they're not really that attractively designed. They're just powerful, loud and fast, and I don't care about that because they're just sitting there on the floor. Maybe if I were driving them I'd be more interested, though I doubt they're as comfortable on a road trip as my gorgeous little Jag. And there are cars that are only remarkable because they're expensive, and therefore relatively rare, like the 1996 Rolls Royce Silver Spur, which has nothing beyond the nameplate to make it desirable. And there are some vehicles that are clearly held as bets on future value, like the Hummer and the gussied-up Dodge Durango.

 (The Rolls, by the way, is for sale with an asking price of less than $23,000. Keep in mind that anyone who sees you in it will assume you bought it new for six figures.)

By the time I finished going through the museum, it was nearly 4pm; too late to do anything else in St Louis. So we crossed over to our hotel in Collinsville, Illinois, where we're booked for three nights. It's the same hotel I've stayed in on both previous visits to St Louis. I really wanted to stay on the Missouri side this time, but the hotels over there are so much more expensive and not really worth the added costs. That, and in one case, a hotel I was all set to book despite the price wanted to add nearly a third of the price in "taxes and fees", but wouldn't tell me what the "fees" were. ("See our Terms and Conditions." I did: the information wasn't there.) And after we checked into our hotel, I started work on this blog, finishing up yesterday's post on Day 3, and writing up the start of our St Louis sojourn. After getting to this point, we went downtown (Collinsville) to find a place where my wife and I ate when we were here a couple of years ago. It wasn't quite where I remembered it, and even now, having just been there, I can't remember the name of it; but we found it and had dinner there and I've decided it will be a good place to watch the US whoop up on Jamaica tomorrow night (fingers crossed).

 Thus endeth the first day in St Louis.

Saturday, June 24:

Gateway Arch from Illinois

 We slept in until nearly 8:30 this morning. Well, I slept in. Roland appears to have woken up at 5:30 and surfed Tik Tok posts for two and a half hours. We got ready for the day and went first to the Mississippi River Observation Deck, in a scary part of East St Louis. There's a ramp there that takes you above the river levee so you can see the Gateway Arch unencumbered. Roland insisted he couldn't walk up its gentle slope because of his knee. I had already been up there on a visit here before, but went up anyway. The river, now, is way down. There are roads and parking lots along it that were under water last time I was here. It was kind of surprising to see.

 Afterwards we crossed the Eads Bridge into St Louis and went to see the Graffiti Wall, a stretch of retainer wall built for the use of random graffiti artists. There was nothing the least bit impressive on it, so after scanning it from the comfort of the car, we went on to brunch at a place called The Egg, on Gravois Avenue. It's a trendy place, apparently, but has a very nice ambience about it. We both had something called "beermosa" -- Hefeweizen and orange juice. It wasn't too bad, but I'd never order it again. I got pulled pork cornbread Benedict. It had two slices of sweet corn bread under three slices of nicely barbecued pork belly, topped with two poached eggs and Hollandaise sauce. On the side was a generous portion of perfectly fried potatoes. 

 From there we went to the St Louis Museum of Fine Arts, in Forest Park. Roland parked himself on a sofa in the first room he came to and stared at a crappy Max Beckmann painting for about four hours while I explored what I could in that time. I saw a few Assyrian animal sculptures and Greek and Roman pieces before tracking down some paintings. If there is a coherent order to the many galleries in this museum, it isn't obvious to me, but each room has a theme, even if it's not connected to that of the next room. 

Martin, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion

 In the hours I was there, I saw maybe a third of the main floor and most of the floor below, which houses the decorative arts that interest me the most: furniture design, ceramics and glass. By the time I'd looked those parts of the musuem over, I didn't think I could stand up any longer, so I collected my passenger and left. We went to Ted Drewes' Frozen Custard shop on Chippewa, a local institution according to something I had read. My source seems to have been accurate: neither of us had ever seen such long lines at a custard shop. It took us at least ten minutes to get to one of the six customer windows to order. I had a Big Apple Concrete, which is apple spice and baked apple chunks mixed up with the frozen custard. "Concrete" is what they call it when it's been mixed on a machine, like a root beer freeze or a Dairy Queen Blizzard. Anyway, picture Sheriff Andy Taylor saying "It was gooo-ood!" It was.

 At that point we had nothing really to do, so we drove back over to our hotel in Illinois and relaxed until it was time to go to dinner. Some source I had checked had recommended a place called Rigazzi's in The Hill, the Italian neighbourhood in St Louis, and since we had no other information, we went there. It was in an early-twentieth-century house, expanded and converted, in a mixed residential and industrial neighbourhood. I'm not aware of a comparable area in San Antonio.

 Even though we'd come early (6:30) there was a wait for a table that ran to about 45 minutes. Then we faced slow, indifferent service: a long wait for drinks, a long wait to order, a long wait for our salads, a long wait for our food, a long wait for our check (even after we'd asked for it). I'd give the service one chili pepper out of five. The food was meh at best. The salads were out of a bag, the bread was off the shelf, the pasta was heavy and overly salty. Two chili peppers out of five. 

Capone at Rigazzi's

 (While Roland was waiting for me to bring the car over from a block away, he encountered some other folks from San Antonio. They, too, thought little of the food or service at Rigazzi's. Definitely not a place to go back to. It is apparently most famous for its claim to be the place where Al Capone was taken prisoner.)

 Once back at our hotel, we threw our leftovers in the fridge and I headed out to watch the US:Jamaica match in the Gold Cup competition at the tavern we'd been to the night before. (I still can't remember the name of it!) I got there a few minutes before the match started, concerned about getting a good seat. I needn't have been. I was one of about 20 people in there.  I had a table with a clear view of the match on a large screen. My shot of bourbon cost me five bucks (I just had the one) and the Diet Coke I portion it in to was free. With refills, it lasted me the whole match, which by the was was a fairly exciting (as in frustrating) draw, 1:1. The US has sent its B team to the Gold Cup, not the first time US Soccer has entered a tournament it didn't take particularly seriously; but at least in this case there's the excuse that all the top players featured in the Nations League final just a week or so before, and they're back with their clubs across Europe. This tournament will be a test of BJ Callaghan's abilities as a coach. Can he get this second-tier group of MLS and Liga MX players to gel? Can he get them to the semifinal? The final? Or will they somehow contrive to not win their group of minnows? The world awaits.

Sunday, June 25:

 Our original plan was to spend Sunday in St Louis too, but since we'd pretty much done all the stuff I really wanted to do (and there was nothing in particular that Roland wanted to do) we've decided to move on. I told the desk clerk this yesterday morning, but he apparently didn't make note of the fact. So there was a discussion with the clerk this morning, but it worked out as it should have. As I finish writing up this blog post, Roland has found a tennis match on TV to ignore while he surfs Tik Tok. I expect he hardly slept at all last night, but he'll sleep in the car as soon as we get going.

 And, as I told Roland: Italian food is usually better as leftovers than as fresh food, even the best of it. The leftovers I had from last night were an exception.

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A New Wander, Day 3: Little Rock to Missouri

 This is part three of many. You really should read them in order. You'll find Part One here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip.

 I found us a good place for breakfast in North Little Rock this morning. It was called BJ's Market Cafe, because it's in the Farmer's Market, a large complex of warehouses near railroad tracks and highways. It was also close to a branch of Chase Bank, which was my first destination of the day, so that was a point strongly in its favour. It was also the only place listed on Yelp's or TripAdvisor's top-ten list that wasn't a chain restaurant. 

 After breakfast (oatmeal, an homage to A Certain Person who has that most mornings when travelling) I plugged a route into Google Maps, then had to re-do it three times before I could get one that didn't take us down 15 miles of frontage road along Interstate 40, or along Interstate 40 itself. It's tedious, putting in meaningless intermediate stops along the roads I want, but it's the only way to get the program to take me down back roads when there's a freeway in the way. And then when we get near one of those useless intermediate points, I can cancel the stop and it should continue to the next. Sometimes I forget to cancel the stop, and end up turning down weird little roads and wondering why the Hell I'm going there.

says it all

 Our first stop after the bank was Toad Suck. Really just because of the name of the town. It's right on the Arkansas River, with its own lock and high bridge, but there's nothing at all to see there except the sign welcoming you to town. It's so Arkansas.

 Then we cruised up through the Ozarks. Hours of driving on well-maintained winding mountain roads with little traffic, top down, gorgeous weather, highs in the 80s. We stopped for lunch at Mountain View, a very tourist-oriented place. I parked on the street by the courthouse and was gratified by how many people stopped to look at the car and comment on it. (They didn't know it was mine; I was in the shade on the sidewalk some small distance away, enjoying the show. There was probably a Trump-like cloud of narcissism hanging about me, visible only to cats and witches.) Although I did notice that, last night in Little Rock, that son of a bitch with the red Nissan who parked too close to me at Club Taco scratched my car with his door. Roland said it was alright, because he'd put a nice big scratch in the red Nissan when trying to get back into my car. He had a hard time of it because he couldn't open the car door far enough (because of the red Nissan). Karma sucks, dude. 

 If I thought I could find that red car I'd go back to Little Rock and do some real damage to it. I'm thinking broken windows.

 There was a local crafts school on a corner in Mountain View. I went to check it out after lunch, hoping it'd be like the Kentucky state crafts operations I've seen. (Lunch, by the way, was unremarkable except for featuring a dessert of Ozark Mountain pie: coconut and chocolate. Sherry would have hated it, but I didn't.) Anyway, the Kentucky craft shops always have excellent work for sale. But no, this shop consisted of the kind of arts and crafts one sees in pop-up pavilions at the Strawberry Festival or the Taste of New Orleans: ticky-tack jewelry, cheap stained glass Christmas ornaments, some artless pottery and fabrics. Not really worth the block-and-a-half walk to get there.

 North of Mountain View, near a town called Allison, is an old one-lane suspension bridge, one of only two in the state. I'd been across the other, in northwestern Arkansas, a few years ago, and it had been kind of exciting. Roland was unimpressed in the extreme, though, so it was really anticlimactic. Still, glad I did it.

Rocky Falls

 Our main stop in the afternoon was at Rocky Falls, in Missouri. This is a very pretty place, but there were about 30 people there, which I hadn't expected, since it's so remote. Roland refused to walk the 80 yards down to see the falls so I went by myself, which made it less fun. But I took a few pictures and watched the kids and others climbing around on the rocks and swimming in the swimmin' hole and lounging on the pebble shore, and then wandered back to the car. We took the wrong road on leaving (no internet out there) and came to a dirt road after about three miles, and then the dirt road became a track and I said, No, I'll not be taking my pegasus down that trail, so we turned around and found the right road. 

 The only hotels we could locate were about 15 miles out of our planned route, so we had made a reservation in Farmington. It turned out to be a pretty good place: nicer than either of the hotels we'd stayed in earlier on this trip, insofar as it had carpet on the floors and the toilet didn't overflow. A little more expensive, though, but we're both rich old men and can afford it, however much we don't want to. 

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