is it saint lewis (like off morse) or saint louey (like the kings)? this were a question that had been bugging us since the morning. we drove through town looking for somewhere to kip and eventually found a drury inn in the town centre. we check in and our room is next to the swimming pool and the place where you get breakfast from. we really couldn't be any happier.
we're wandering around looking for pubs (which we've started to realise isn't really the best way to find stuff) and eventually we flag down a taxi and we've got the best taxi driver in the whole world: hal. he takes us to soulard because there's a few decent bars up there.
hal's hobby is fishing in the mississippi river for crappie which he eats almost exclusively. he also has bad guts. i'm not saying there's a definite connection there or anything, but his guts would constantly interrupt him through his converstaion for example ben asks him where the dodgy bits of st louis are and hal says "well it's mainly like any other city there's lots of bad places but if you know where they are - man my guts."
hal drops us off at molly's and indicates a few other bars we might like to check out in the area. we sat outside and had a beer, but there's not a lot happening, just one bloke playing chess with the barman. we decide we're going to go inside and listen to the live music, despite the barmans advice that we'd be better off out here with him. there's some bloke on guitar and he's constantly being heckled for third eye blind numbers, we're just drinking beer and laughing, and then a couple of blokes take to the stage.
they're called 'the brians' as they're band is made up exclusively of people called brian. i don't believe this for a second like. anyway they'd just come back from playing some festival on the other side of town and it was their first time playing there for age etc, etc. they were brilliant. they had this one song which went "i'm not gay, i just like rainbows". genius.
we head on to the next bar but they're already closing so we manage to get a quick beer while they 'phone us a taxi and ben's talking to some bloke all about route 66 and says we've got to hit ted drewes for some frozen custard. when the taxi turns up it's only hal again isn't it? so hal suggests BB's but it's shut so he takes us to pop's which is open 24 hours a day. poor hal: if only he'd known he could have just taken us there at the start.
in pop's we witness the oldest band in the universe (with the fattest guitarist in the universe and all). it's full of mingers and rednecks and after a few beers we decide to head to the strip club next door. it were fun because colin hadn't been to one before and ben had the opportunity to judge the relative merits of plastic and real tits using only his face.
back in pops we decide to have more beer (we asked for heineken and the beer came in little kegs) and play some pool. by this point some actual people have turned up and we're chatting to them about stuff, and then eventually me and ben decide to call it a day and leave for the hotel. we step outside and it's light. eventually the taxi turns up and it's a nightmare: the traffic on the roads is just about to hit it's morning peak and we're being driven badly in something what looks like it's going to fall apart.
back at the hotel me and ben get a load of breakfast and we've got the breakfast ladies in stitches: we're a bit giddy because we haven't slept and drank a lot of beer, then we check ourselves in for another night and go to bed.
me and ben are suddenly ripped out of us sleep by the cleaners: it's about half one and we've got to get out of there so they can tidy the room, so we take quick showers and then out into st louis. it's a nice hot day and we head to the mall and ouside there's a bunch of kids who ask ben where he got his trainers. ben says he got them from amsterdam that's where he lives and they're all impressed and that and we talk about marijuana for a bit (until they try to sell us some) and then we go into the mall so ben can get a cardinals cap, a phonecard and i get a route 66 book.
next stop is the gateway to the west which is a super big arch in fact it is the biggest in the world. it's about two hundred miles high and the above pictures were taken from the top of it. we had to go through more security scans to get into the bit underneath the arch and then you get a tram all the way up to the top. it's mental. this is me and ben at the very top:
back down under the arch they've got the museum of westward expansion which i have a brief look at while ben gets postcards and that and we end up talking to a scottish women. if that's not odd enough, when we go back above ground there's a bloke there in a west brom top. still we get some stylised photographs of us under the arch which looks weird because it's so absolutely huge.
get back to the hotel and there's a note from colin so we hang around and wait for him and when he finally turns up we decide that we're going to see the cardinals play the cincinatti reds. i han't got a clue how the sport works but colin used to watch it on the telly so he patiently explains what's going on and by the end of it i'm getting well excited. we've got bleacher seats whatever they are but we're in a good position and i nearly take a home run to the face. the cardinals win: go home cincinatti - you suck ass.
i forgot to mention the location of our hotel - about five minutes from the arch and about ten minutes from the stadium, but how can we be expected to walk the ten minute journey back without having a pint? that's right, we can't so we pop into calico's on the way back for a couple of jars. i'm surprised to find the hotel door locked when we get back given that it was open when we got back from last night, but then ben solves the mystery by pointing out that it were about nine in the morning when we got back from last night.
we'd got in pretty early the night before so we were up early and ready for another massive breakfast. after we'd ate us food, we set off in search of ted drewes frozen custard. unfortunately the early start plan that we had meant that the place wasn't open yet when we got there. still we got a photograph of it but we was all well up for some frozen custard i tell you.
after that we're once again heading west on interstate 44 towards springfield, where the simpsons live. but not lincoln.
got some pictures of the mosque on the way in what is made out of red brick and terracotta and isn't the biggest most massivest mosque in the world, which is a shame because then it would of been massive.
we parked up and walked into the park in the centre of town. the square was the place of an infamous shootout where "wild bill" hickok hammered dave tutt with his bullets. shot his face clean off in broad daylight. wild bill never got done for it but when he tried to run for mayor a couple of years later the citizens of the town told him politely "no thanks". there's a plaque to mark the occasion but it's in the middle of the road and we kept nearly getting run over trying for to take a picture of it all.
after we mucked about on the square we went to get summat to eat at the old route 66 cafe. mmm mmm it were nice and we were talking to the woman what ran the place about amsterdam and stuff.
on the road again, and we're starting to get into baptist territory: the bible belt. it's a mental place, every village we pass though has about twenty first churches of summat-or-other and at the side of the road there's these huge billboards with extracts from the bible towering eighty miles high above the road warning us about the evils of telly, sport and fast food.
we come off the interstate at joplin, as the interstate veers off south bypassing kansas and we want to go to kansas so after spending half an hour driving round joplin totally lost, we find the road and head into kansas.