Meet Me In St. Louis

Whooo-eee, did we whoop it up in Saint Louis, y'all (they say that down there)!  

Not that the trip wasn't without its pitfalls, mostly due to my...shall we say...stupidity.  Yes, I said stupid.  I know that's not a nice word, but I can say it about myself.  

So I had this trip planned down to the minute and the penny.  I had airline tickets purchased ahead of time, I had VRBO reservations confirmed, I had tickets purchased and confirmed for the Arch, a riverboat cruise, a trolley tour, and a tour of the Anheuser-Busch brewery.  Folks, I was on fire!

The night before we were flying out, though, I went down in a blaze of (not) glory.  I went to do the e-check in thing for our Delta tickets.  As I'm talking out loud to myself and saying whose name was on what ticket, it hit me like  a ton of brick (which was appropriate, as we shall discuss later in this chapter) that the name on my ticket was Jude, not Judith.  

Many bad words.  Call Delta immediately and wait on hold.  And wait.  And wait.  And wait.  

Ninety minutes later I said more bad words and hung up.  I had been scoping the website at Delta and there were a multitude of links that said "cancel your ticket here."  

Well, all right then, that seems easy enough.  Nope, wouldn't let me do that.  Apparently it was too close to the departure time, which is stupid (yep, said it again) because you can't even check in until 24 hours ahead of time!!  

However, in their defense, they did email me a confirmation MONTHS ago with the wrong name on it, and I just didn't clue in, so it was on me all the way, not them.  

Okay, I bit the bullet and decided I would just book another ticket or I'd get left behind.  That went through fine, but now I had two tickets in my name(s).  Too bad, so sad.  Didn't care as long as I could plunk my ignorant butt into a seat and fly to Saint Louis.  

Which I could and did.  We landed in Saint Louis just before lunch.  We are not big city people used to cabs, light rail, Uber, and all that good stuff, but we flagged down a taxi for a ride to our VRBO.  

Can we say "ouch"?!  That ain't cheap, people!!  But we got there, and that's what counts.  

We had the sweetest, cutest, most comfortable little garden apartment in the history of garden apartments!  Don't you just love the brick?  Every single house that we saw in all of our meanderings was made of brick.  I don't believe we saw one clapboard house at all.  Apartment buildings, homes, businesses...all brick.  It was pretty awesome.

Thursday afternoon and evening was seriously just chilling at our VRBO.  We called and had pizza delivered, and then got the bright idea to have booze delivered.  I didn't even know they did that, but I guess Door Dash is for more than just food!  

Now we were cooking with Crisco.  Does anyone even use Crisco anymore?  Sorry, I digress...

There was a very nice flat panel TV in a very comfortable living room, so we tuned in HGTV and started binging.  

Anyone who has heard about our girls' trip to Chicago when Molly was in high school knows that this is our M.O.  We are locked up right and tight by 8 p.m., in our jammies, drinking our alcohol of choice, and watching HGTV. 

We really got into the show Home Town with Erin and Ben Napier out of Laurel, Mississippi.  By the time the weekend was over and we'd seen three out of five season, we all considered ourselves experts.  Wink, wink.  

Not only that, but I came away with some seriously cool ideas for my remodel-the-kitchen-someday file.  

Anyway, after we'd relaxed around the apartment for the better part of the afternoon, we decided we needed to stock some snacky stuff in the fridge.  There was an Aldi about half a mile away, so we decided we could walk.  

Y'all, don't try to walk anywhere in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the middle of August at 4:30 in the afternoon.  You might as well be swimming, the humidity is so heavy!  After we got back with our two bags of stuff that we made Molly carry because she is young and fit, we decided that Uber was going to be our friend the remainder of the weekend.  

With that in mind, we picked a place in our neighborhood for supper, and Molly did the Uber app thing.  I'm so glad we had her along because she is one of the smart girls who can figure stuff like that out.  I'd have ended up walking because I wouldn't be able to figure the app out.  

As we were riding toward the little bar/grill place, I mentioned that the sky was looking rather ominous with dark gray clouds and rather stiff winds.  

Sure enough, it wasn't long after we got seated in the restaurant that she let loose and it was wild.  Wind, rain, lightning, thunder...we go the whole show.  But it seemed to cut the humidity a little bit after it settled down.  

We Ubered back to the apartment and returned to our regularly scheduled programming of jammies and HGTV for a couple of hours before heading to bed.  

Day One in Saint Louis:  success!