You Really Can See Saint Louis in a Day. We Did.

From Columbia Mike and I followed Scottie to his place in the ghetto of Saint Louis.

No really, its a little shady. And by "shady" I do not mean "having many trees to provide shade."

I mean "had to park our truck in another, safer neighborhood to make sure it didn't get broken into."

But Scottie's place is really nice...

And so is Saint Louis. We made a pilgrammage to the Arch: The Gateway to the West. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here, folks. There is barbeque to discuss first.

You see, this part of the cross country trip is the Rib Tasting Tour. Yes, we were going directly from St. Louis to Memphis, so you know what that means: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Mike to taste, compare and judge St. Louis ribs and Memphis style ribs back-to-back. Folks, this is like Food Network type action.

So Scottie has done some advance research for us and found Pappy's, a no-frills, out-of-the-way joint with picnic tables and plastic tableclothes -- which means its not just going to be good -- its going to be damn good.

And damn good it was. The ribs are served dry, which means you can expirament with sauces, and they have three: hot sauce, original and Sweet Baby Jane. The latter two are molasses based and sweet and thick, which works perfectly with their vinegar cole slaw.

They also have deep-fried corn. Yeah, really. Sounds good. Looks good. Mike would describe it as "kernels of oil popping in your mouth." We reccommend you stick with conventional corn preparations.

Results of the Great American Beth and Mike Rib Taste Off in next post.

We also hit up a Basilica nearby which was covered in mosaics. For those of you who don't know, I have a (completely worthless) art history minor and grew up Catholic, so the Cathedral was pretty cool. Its cool even if you don't have my worthless minor and grew up agnostic, because there are over 47 million tiny pieces of glass tile covering the walls an cielings.

All these intricate designs and illustrations were created out of one-inch square pieces of glass. Its pretty awe-inspiring.

Now, if you have been paying attention to baseball at all, then you know that the All-Star Game and Homerun Derby were taking place in St. Louis while we were there. This is not great timing on our part, because Major Baseball Events = Lots of people and traffic.

But we made it to the arch. The arch is sweet. You can stand below it and look up, and this thing is ENORMOUS. As it turns out, anything enormous is cool. The largest cross in the western hemisphere, the corn palace, giant artichokes. Whatever. You make it big, they will come.

Apparantly you can take an elevator to the top, but Scottie and Tawna had done this and told us that the ride to the top is horrifying. The elevator has to move on an angle as it moves up, and the creaking and banging resulting from this movement is enough to scare you out of elevators permanantly.

So we passed on that.

Instead, we went in search of beers. Scottie took us to this old part of town called Soulard, which reminds us of New Orleans a bit, only more brick and it smells better. But many of the restaurants and bars have awesome outside seating areas. The one we went to, McGurk's, had lush gardens, wrought iron cafe tables and a waterfall that ended in a pond full of coyfish.

Great place to hang out and have a beer.

So we had two.

Then Scottie took us to his favorite part of Saint Louis: Forrest Park. The park is larger than Central Park in New York City and perhaps has more to offer. There are museums, all kinds of tennis and raquetball courts, running paths, and a boathouse with a restaurant where we, of course, drank beers.

This is where Scottie goes running and where Scottie and Tawna like to take Hannah -- their flipping adorable Austrailian Shephard (of course I might be biased...).

We topped off our incredibly full day with killer Thai food at Basil Spice on Grand Street, which is the "Chinatown" of Saint Louis. Then we did what all good Saint Louis citizens do on a hot night: we got frozen custard at Drewes.

Drewes is crazy good. The parking lot is packed, but the lines go super-quick. I especially loved the service:

Me: I have vanilla.

Chick Working at Drewes: Really?

Me: Why. What should I have.

Chick Working at Drewes: A flavor.

I get Oreo. It is amazing. It is superior to Scottie's raspberry and Mike's peanut butter cup. They have frozen custard envy and we are all fatter and happier than before we went to Drewes.

And the next morning we are sad, because we have to leave our friends and head to Elvis...