It got better

I started writing this post the day before we left to drive back to Boulder and then things have been so crazy that I never got back to it. So I think I'll just go ahead and finish it now, as things never do calm down.

***

My last post about our trip to St. Louis was so gloomy, perhaps it's hard to believe that things got better. But things got better. Two things contributed to this.

1. Rocket Boy got better and became able to drive. Quite a bit of my misery on this trip had to do with having to be the driver. I don't like to drive his car (the brakes feel weird, the car is bigger than I'm comfortable with), and I don't like to drive in St. Louis. It makes me uncomfortable to sit in the passenger seat while he's driving, but anything's better than actually doing the driving.

2. The Post-Dispatch (St. Louis newspaper) published an article about where to get good "frozen treats" in the city. They mentioned about 15 different places, and we learned that there are actually LOTS more. I decided that we should go to a different place each of our last nights here. We ended up going to three different places, and one of them twice (one night we didn't go out because it was supposed to rain hard, which it did, but not until later, so we could have gone, but it's OK). I need to remember that going out for really good ice cream is a cure for a lot of problems.

On Monday we drove to scary north St. Louis and had gigantic ice cream sundaes at Crown Candy Kitchen, which has been in operation since 1913. We decided it would be more fun with only one twin, since they had been fighting so much, so we took Teen B along and left Teen A back at the apartment to have some alone time. It might have been better to switch them out, because Teen B walked into Crown Candy Kitchen and announced, rather too loudly, "It smells weird in here." If you'd been a soda fountain for over 100 years, you might smell weird too. Anyway, we all ordered gigantic sundaes loaded with whipped cream and pecans (mine was a "Newport" version of a Swiss Chocolate Sundae), and they were prepared and delivered quickly and they were SOOO good. When I took my first bite of mine, I thought -- hey, I'm happy. I liked everything about the place, not just the ice cream. I would definitely go back.

After eating (and buying some candy to go), we took a drive through north St. Louis because Rocket Boy wanted to see where Pruitt-Igoe had been. There's nothing left of the enormous housing project that became so controversial -- and had a major effect on race relations in St. Louis. I didn't really know what we were looking at, but the next day Rocket Boy picked up a video about it that he'd reserved at the library ("The Pruitt-Igoe Myth"), and we watched it, and I learned a lot. A lot about Pruitt-Igoe and a lot about St. Louis in general.

Tuesday, we decided to go to an ice cream store that hadn't been included in the newspaper article, but got good reviews online: Clementine's Naughty & Nice Creamery. Rocket Boy had been there once and kind of sniffed about it -- he hadn't been impressed -- but I wanted to go, so we went, taking Teen A with us. I forgot to take a picture, but my opinion of the place is as follows. The ice cream (I had "Blue Moon") is really really really good, but it's too expensive and ultimately probably not worth it. They didn't even have any prices posted, so when the total for our two cones and one float came to over $30, I was totally shocked.

But it has to be said (again), the ice cream was really really really good.

Wednesday night, as I said, we stayed home, and eventually St. Louis got about five more inches of rain to add to the massive amount we got the week before. 

Thursday, Rocket Boy actually went in to his office, and didn't get home until just past 7 pm, so our ice cream outing was postponed a little. We were all starving by then, so we decided to go to Fitz's (one of the newspaper's recommendations) for floats and dinner, not realizing that a Fitz float really can BE dinner. 

We all ordered food and beverages. The kids got bottomless root beer, Rocket Boy got a frozen root beer float, and I got, in addition to fish & chips, something called a Ghostbuster -- which you can see, melting onto its saucer in the photo.

When this was delivered to me, both the fish & chips (my favorite), and that absolutely amazing root beer float, I was so happy. It was similar to how I felt at the Crown Candy Kitchen, except in this case I didn't just have something sweet, I also had fish & chips. It wasn't that I wanted to eat it all -- though I did finish the float, I only ate one piece of fish and a few fries (the rest of the fish was my Friday lunch). But something about being able to order this marvelous food, all for me, and have them bring it to me, and I could have as much of it as I wanted, just made me feel so loved. I can't explain it, but it was an amazing feeling.

Friday was our last full day in St. Louis, so we made a long list of things we still needed/wanted to get done. I decided that I should give the miniatures museum another try, so around 11 am we drove over there and Teen B and I went to it (Rocket Boy and Teen A went off to do a bunch of errands). I was so glad we did -- though we were momentarily shocked to realize that masks were required and had to run back to the car to grab one for Teen B -- it's just an amazing museum. Two floors of dollhouses, dollhouses, dollhouses. It started to make me slightly nauseated after a while, perfect little room after perfect little room after perfect little room. Teen B actually liked it a lot too. We made a game out of trying to find all the dogs and cats in the various rooms of the houses.

The one thing Rocket Boy wanted to do before we left was ride the St. Louis trolley, which had just started running again on Thursday. It was free, and you could jump on or off at any of its six stops. So we drove to the History Museum, which is at one end of the trolley line, at about 5 pm, and caught it there. The trolley isn't air conditioned, and of course we were having another horribly hot and humid St. Louis day -- BUT it turned out that the trolley created its own nice breeze as it rumbled along, so it wasn't as hot as all that. Lots of other people rode the trolley too -- it was almost full. We rode to the end of the line and then the driver moved to the wheel at the other end of the trolley and drove us back -- the trolley doesn't turn around, it just goes forward and then backward.

For the twins' sake, I resisted singing "The Trolley Song" from "Meet Me in St. Louis" but it was hard. Rocket Boy said that when the trolley stopped running (due to financial reasons? mechanical reasons? can't remember) a year or so ago, the headline in the newspaper was "Clang Clang Clunk Went the Trolley."

The trolley goes through the Delmar Loop shopping district -- right by Fitz's Root Beer, in fact. We had been talking about where to go for that day's frozen treat. I felt we should have frozen custard, which is popular in St. Louis, and specifically a "concrete," which I think is similar to a Dairy Queen blizzard. But the place for frozen custard is Ted Drewes, which means standing outside in a line -- and it was just too hot and humid to stand outside in a line. Plus then you would have to stand around outside eating the frozen custard. It didn't seem appealing. As we went past Fitz's, Teen A said, "Why don't we just go back to Fitz's?" and amazingly, everyone agreed.

Rocket Boy and I didn't order food this time around, just gigantic floats. The twins actually did get food, but from the kiddie menu -- Teen A had mozzarella sticks and a salad, Teen B had a grilled cheese sandwich and a salad. All of us ate/drank every drop of our gigantic floats. It was heaven.

Saturday we packed the car and got on the road, much later than I had wanted us to, at about 11. Maybe 11:15. And even so, we "forgot" to take out the garbage, and it had french fries and a tub of cooked (and rejected, by Teen B) ramen in it. Every day since then I've thought about what must be happening to that garbage in Rocket Boy's hot apartment (we turned off the air conditioners just as we were leaving). I'm so glad I don't have to go back to that, but Rocket Boy does, in three weeks. I put "forgot" in quotes because we didn't forget -- nobody wanted to do it, because it's hard to take the garbage out, and we were wearing ourselves out carrying luggage up and down the stairs and packing the car, and nobody wanted to ALSO make a trip downstairs and down the street to the alley where the dumpsters are, carrying a smelly bag of trash.

I am so glad to be out of St. Louis.

The first day we only managed to drive to Junction City, Kansas, but at least we were out of Missouri. I was so happy to be out of Missouri, I could just taste it. Kansas is a long, boring state, but it has an important thing going for it: it's not Missouri! 

I wanted us to get an early start on Sunday, because heavy thunderstorms were predicted for the Denver/Boulder area by evening. But I couldn't get anyone moving. We got two rooms in the Best Western we stayed in Saturday night, two double queens, and Rocket Boy stayed with Teen A while I stayed with Teen B. This meant that everyone got their own queen bed to sleep in, and the beds were comfortable, so we should have been well rested and ready to go early. But Rocket Boy was (and is) still moving very slowly after his surgery, and Teen A was sick, and Teen B was coming down with it... and anyway, we didn't leave until 10:30 or so. Maybe 10:45.

I had asked Rocket Boy to get us out of St. Louis on Saturday, which he did, and then I drove from the outskirts of St. Louis to the outskirts of Kansas City. He drove us from Kansas City to Topeka and then I drove us to Junction City. But on Sunday it was all me, almost all day. I drove us from Junction City to Limon, Colorado, which is roughly 387 miles, and then he drove us the last 100 miles home. I drove as fast as I thought I could get away with, but it wasn't fast enough. We were on the outskirts of Denver when the storm hit, and it hit so hard that you couldn't see the road. It reminded me of the time I drove through a tornado in Minnesota with my mother. Rocket Boy pulled over, as did a lot of other cars, though we were horrified to see plenty of cars continuing on through the mess. Later, as we started driving again, we passed a whole bunch of cars that had taken shelter under an overpass. It was really a terrible storm.

We stopped at Great Scott's for dinner, and to have a break after all that. And then we went home, driving through another storm, but not as bad. We got home around 9 pm and the cats were very puzzled -- who are these people?

***

It is very good to be home. I feel so lucky to live here, in Boulder, and in a house, not an apartment on the second floor of an old house with the laundry in the basement and the trash down the street and shootings and sirens outside every night. The fact that our house is small suddenly seems unimportant. If we feel crowded, we can go outside. We take walks every evening, even if it's dark. I never went for a single walk in St. Louis.

So that's always a good thing about going away -- you love your home so much more when you come back.

Today my sister called with some sad news she'd gotten in a text from one of our cousins, about something that one of our other cousins had posted on Facebook. All the strange ways we communicate in the modern age. But at least we still communicate. I haven't processed this news yet -- it's still kind of blowing me away. 

Anyway, we're home.