Now there is a theme for a trip!
Tami and Mike had an adventure this morning – our first use of the Uber app. We have ridden in cars arranged by others a few times, but have never tried it out ourselves. Despite assuming we would screw it up somehow, we managed a successful trip to the airport. It made for an overall easy transit to Missouri, but flying over the Cascades gave us an up close view of some of the continuing fires and smoky mountains.
Smokey Mountains
The reason we took Uber instead of our usual bus and light rail to the airport is that we have the BIG Bike Friday suitcases with us. Just a bit much to try and lug around the streets. It is so much nicer to have our own bikes here, though, rather than spending the week on rental bikes. We will leave them packed for now, and get them built up after we get back into town on Sunday. We have a group meeting with Bubba Sunday evening, to get us all organized for starting the ride Monday morning. I understand there are 42 riders signed up for this tour!
People tend to look at us a little funny when we say we are flying to Missouri for vacation, but there is actually a reason. We are taking a week bike trip with Bubba’s Pampered Pedalers on the Katy trail that crosses most of the state from St. Louis to Clinton. The bike trip starts next Monday, but we flew down early to do a little touristing (and to catch a soccer game). We will be here in the St. Louis area for a couple days, then take a train to Kansas City where we will attend a Sporting KC game, then take the train back. One more notch on Tami’s list of MLS stadiums visited.
We are staying in St. Charles, named after Saint Kevin Charles, an early Columbia, Missouri journalist. After we checked into our hotel, we caught a local trolley bus for a short tour of the area. There is a very cool historic main street that we will go back to check out more closely tomorrow. We also fulfilled the first item on our trip checklist, having some St. Louis BBQ. We were impressed with Hendricks BBQ just down the road from our hotel and located in the old St. Charles Waterworks building. Besides the wonderful dry rubbed ribs, we had fried green tomatoes, southern greens, creamed spinach, and some great biscuits. Oh yeah, the moonshine sangria was pretty good too. And locally brewed pecan brown ale.
Hendricks BBQ
Just liked the detail work