Meet Me (and Flat Stanley) in St. Louis

I bid a 15 day line for the month of January. Now those of you who know Ron, know he doesn't like to work 15 days a month (prefer the 10-12 day lines) but this trip is just too good to pass up. Late sign in with one leg to STL, long layover, one leg to LAX, short layover, and two legs home via Orlando.

So what does one do for 20 hours in St. Louis? You go to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, AKA The Gateway Arch. Since I am still truckin' along with Flat Stanley, I took him along as well.

Side note: Stan has now logged over 20K miles of travel since I started taking him places.... don't forget to check out his website at http://my.flightmemory.com/flatstan to see where he is going.

I went to lunch at the St. Louis bread company on Sunday afternoon with Lucinda, one of my flying partners for the month. I was a little miffed because I wanted the Chicken Chipotle Panini, but I wanted them to hold the tomatoes, but the waitress explained that they don't add or take anything off the panini sandwiches. I told her I was allergic to tomatoes, which is a lie of course, but she did not seem to care one way or the other, so I got a big bowl of Black Bean soup instead.

It was pretty windy in St. Louis that day, so Lucinda declined to go to the Arch with me, so I walked her back to the hotel (it was downtown St. Louis after all, so you have to be careful) and then headed for the Arch.

The entire sidewalk leading up to it was covered in duck crap.

You enter the arch via an underground ramp. They have a nice museum that talks about the heroes of Westward expansion (yet strangely mentions nothing about the Indians we corralled onto Reservations and turned into alcoholics) like Lewis and Clark and Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase.

You then board these tiny pods that seat 6 people and ride up to the top of the Arch. It takes about 4 minutes to go up and 3 minutes to go down. It was rockin' pretty hard at the top because of the wind, and it was real warm so I only stayed up there for a few minutes. When it was time to go down, the employee directed me to Pod #4, but when I got there, this woman told me I could not ride with her and her family because she is claustrophobic and 4 people in the pod was too much. So I was then directed to Pod#5. On my way out of the monument I saw the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile.

Got back to the hotel around 5pm, which did not leave me much time to get ready for our pick up at 5:45pm. We ended up being delayed out of STL because the plane was late coming in, and then we were late arriving in LAX because of weather and then an EVA Air 777 broke down on the tarmac and everything got stuck. Not fun. The pick up area was packed, it looked like refugees were all fleeing the airport. We arrived so late, we had less than 8 hours behind the door, as required per the Union, so we ended up losing our trip to Orlando this morning, and just deadheaded home instead.

I ended up sitting next to this woman named Kathy who was quite pleasant. She and 5 other old ladies had gone to California to see the Rose Parade and then went to Vegas and Laughlin to gamble. She was also the owner of a new Concealed Hand Gun permit, which she showed me (the permit.... not the gun obviously).