ASNN

St. Louis

Still have pictures to upload while I have a fast net.connection (thanks Steve!), but I'm so tired. To catch up with blogging, though, I'll talk about Saint Louis and the Cardinals-Brewers game I caught there.

The drive from Joliet (Chicago) to St. Louis ("STL", because I'm lazy) was pretty, especially north of about Bloomington, IL. Autumn was just beginning to touch the trees and corn fields and bring color to the expansive greens. There isn't a whole lot between Chicago and STL so the drive itself was pretty uneventful.

My hotel in Collinsville, IL, was disappointing. Not that I was expecting a whole lot for $45... I guess it served its purpose.

The drive over to Busch Stadium from the hotel was cool. The approach to Busch is marked by the STL Arch seemingly rising from the ground to tower over everything, stadium and all. Getting downtown and parked was fairly easy and the short walk to Busch from the lot was unremarkable.

Let me take a moment to explain why I use such boring, uninspired language to describe Busch and STL. I think, in general, it's a pretty boring, uninspired ballpark and town compared to Wrigley and Chicago. A large majority of that sentiment is probably because I was with friends in Chicago and we had a good tour guide amongst us. By myself in an unfamiliar city, I probably wasn't able to enjoy STL as much. This will be a recurring theme in future posts; that said, I still don't think STL has much going for it.

The main thing I noticed about Busch Stadium was how LARGE it is. It's not the "friendly confines" of Wrigley; it's like really old stadiums and really new stadiums are generally more personal, but there were a rash of parks built in the 60s (cf. Astrodome) that were just monstrous.

The other thing I noticed is the severe lack of beer options. The selections were about as bad as it could get, far worse than the lack of a reasonable draft option at Wrigley. (No, Old Style doesn't count as a "reasonable draft option" Jonathan.) At least Wrigley had good canned beers; Busch had nothing but (surprise!) Annheiser-Busch beers. (I'm not even going to dignify that by looking up how it's spelled.) So one $8.75 Budweiser later, I called it an early evening. The Cards were up by about ten runs in the eighth, and I figured the Applebee's near my hotel would be more interesting (and less stressful on my wallet and palate).

I promptly got lost downtown trying to get back to the freeway. The signs sucked and I made two circles around the city before I finally figured it out. Got back to Collinsville, skipped Applebee's, and crashed at the crappy hotel.

Little did I know, however, that things were about to take a turn for the MUCH worse. More next time about how I missed three games, took a surprise trip to Denver, and ended up driving nearly 1500 miles in three days (around one game) to get back on schedule.

Posted by pcg at September 20, 2003 9:39 PM