For the record

Time for a quick update. Last night, we went to the Basilica Block Party in Minneapolis. It takes place at the Basilica of St. Mary.

Terri, yes, you need to go! Next year for sure. Maybe this could be a blogger meet up??? It could happen.

OhCountess won the tickets to the VIP section. WOW! All of these pictures were taken from our seats. I like the lack of obstruction and the private bartender handing out free beer. Mmmm....free beer.

The Black Crowes were the headline act of the day. Man, did they rock! Those guys put on a fantastic demonstration of the proper way to do a southern blues/rock jam. The only disappoint of the night came as they didn't play "She Talks to Angels," one of our favorite songs.

Erin McCarley was the first act of the night. We weren't sure if we had ever heard of her, but she did sound great. She set the mood for a great night of music.

Next up, Mat Kearney, as far as bands for an out door show go, this guy was amazing. Great voice and just fun music. His guitarist happens to be from Minnesota. He talked several times about how excited they were to be here (of course, don't they all do this?). One really funny comment had to do with how much he loves Minnesota and Minneapolis. He' love it more without some of the winter, but of course, our homeboy had to chime it that putting up with those winter days is still worth it. I couldn't agree more.

Even with a little rain, the concert was a great time. The sights, the sounds and even the smells of the food vendors are hard to put into words.

I was dubbing this weekend "The Weekend of Rock Tour." Tonight, we are off to see Green Day! I looked EVERYWHERE but I can't find my skinny tie. Damn! But we might just have to change that. We are making a stop at the Mall of America today to see Buzz Aldrin. He's a geek rock star of a different...this is the second man to set foot on the moon.

I'm quite sure, there will be plenty more Tweets and blog posts from my phone, as long as the battery holds up. I really need to get an iPhone 3GS. Wait! There's an Apple store at the MOA...hm.

The man that looks like Jesus...#BBP09

The Black Crowes have taken the stage. Enjoy your lived while we are
in rock heaven...

This is more like it...

Mat Kearney on the stage, a cold beer, a cocktail for my wife and
FOOD!!!

Rock on!

VIP seating?

OhCountess seems to have gotten us VIP seating at the Minneapolis
Basilica Block party...oh boi!!!!!

Warm up act Erin McCarley is playing now. Sounds awesome!!!

Weekend in St. Louis: Getting there...

So, how ya been? Had any surprises lately? Been busy?

My life has been nothing but busy and surprises. I don't think I'll bore you with the day to day joys like being the only member of a team of 3 to be working last week. Or the craziness that are the "weekends" of my life...or wait, maybe I will.

Not this past weekend, the pig roast is another post coming soon, the weekend before. You may recall I put up some short posts, a medium size one and a few pictures. To recap, my wife hid a plan to put me in a car and drive to St. Louis Missouri and watch my beloved Minnesota Twins win one of two games vs. the St. Louis Cardinals. Oh, how I love away Twins games...hehe

In this and the next post, I'm gonna share the adventure that was the road trip to St. Louis.

When we left, I was still pretty much in shock by the whole thing. I mean, I went to bed thinking, "how am I gonna keep TheBiggTree (TBT) occupied all day?" As we made our way south to Iowa, we knew breakfast was going to happen....but where.

Thankfully, we love to eat at mom and pop places when we road trip. You know, you can have fast food any day, but on a road trip, live for the moment, take your life in your hands and order "the house special".

This photo on the left, it's the house special at Dave's Restaurant in Charles City Iowa. It's called the Big Daddy and works like this...take a plate full of hash browns, place an easy over egg on them and cover the whole damn plate in sausage gravy.

They had a little daddy at a reduced price but for some reason, we were hungry. The picture, that's what I left behind. It kicked our ass but MAN, was it tasty.

While I was eating, TBT kept reminding me not to over do it cause we had a stop to make soon and we wouldn't want a gut full...OK...so why did we order the big daddy? Can this possibly just sit nicely in my tummy while, as he said, do a little hoofin'?

I was officially "navigating" on our little adventure. I've done this before when planning a trip on Google Maps, add a sort of fake stop to make sure it routes me a certain way, so I improvised and by passed what looked like a fake stop in the travel plans. Oops. No, TBT wanted to stop there. It was our next destination.

No worries, we got ourselves righted and made our way out of town. We drove and drove and found finally found 240th St. It was a gravel road. Um. Okay. We drove down the road looking for a certain house number. I remember asking him, "you planning on whacking me and know a guy that will help you bury me?" We were in the middle of absolutely no where.

Another thought I had was maybe he was taking me to the Field of Dreams. My trivia on this sucked but I knew it was in Iowa, we were going to a baseball game, it could happen, but none of the farms on this road looked anything like the movie.

I'm not sure how I missed this the first time we passed it, but here it is, The All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club.
TBT is a fantastic tennis player. He has taught it at some of the private clubs in the area. He'd remembered reading about this place in Tennis magazine. I lettered in tennis in high school. That was 22 years ago.
When you make a reservation, they go all out. It's hard to see, but in front of each chair was a lawn sign, with our names on them! Now don't we feel special.
It really is a grass tennis court in the middle of the corn fields and the wind mills. It was absolutely amazing. Neither on of us had ever played tennis on grass. We both have some very limited experience on clay, the other major court surface, but here in the US, asphalt is mack daddy of tennis courts. This was really cool! Again, a complete and total surprise.

Our next stop wasn't a total surprise. One of the things we planned on doing while he had come to visit me was do a little geo caching. In his travel folder he had several geo caches that were on the way. One seemed to be just ripe for the pickin'. It was called JBird's Nest.

I'd never really done geo caching before but had always been very interested in it. Father of Five had written about it and I know others who have and it always sounds so fun.

TBT had the handheld GPS and a little experience. By the clues, we guessed this church was the right spot and sure enough, there it was under the tree!

OK, it really wasn't that brain dead easy. We walked around the back for a while and looked behind all the ventilation systems.

We didn't want to stay too long. We still needed to complete our primary mission. Busch Stadium and a baseball game. We left New London and got back on the highway making a bee line to the hotel to drop off our crap and catch the train into the city. Like we had any idea how to do that...

Until tomorrow...

Happy Indpendence Day!

Mmmm...looks like we are having roast pig for dinner.

Today's Seats

Holy crap! This is the view from our club seats. Section 202 seat 30.
Look for me. I'll be the guy eating from the buffet and drinking free
beer.

My wife, I tell ya...

All those posts from yesterday were done from my phone. Here's the scoop typed on a keyboard that's a bit easier to use. So, one of my good friends comes to town for a visit. I knew about this for a while. I'd been making plans to do a little of this and a little of that...heck, we were even having a meeting of our whiskey club Friday night. All is good, he arrives on time Thursday night. Just after I get done dropping the kids off at grandma's so we can have Friday to just enjoy.

Supposedly, my wife needed to work yesterday. She got up, showered, got dressed in her work cloths...the whole enchilada. She even left...

My friend was downstairs, awake and fiddling with his GPS. I went outside to take the garbage and recycling to the street and while I was out there, he'd come out too. He asks me to come over a look at his GPS to see if it looked right to me. It said "STL"...destination, St. Louis.

We had talked much earlier in the year about getting to some Minnesota Twins away games. The St. Louis on seemed to have the most promise, but as far as I had know, it just wasn't gonna work out.

"Um, are we going to the game?" I asked.

"Yep"

ROAD TRIP!

This is a surprise birthday present from my wife...that crafty vixen!

The picture at the top was taked from our seats during the first game. You see, when you drive 8 hours to go watch your team play, you catch as many as you can. There's a noon game today and we have tickets to "The Legends Club".

Other plans include possibly playing some cards at a local casino, visiting the brewery, toursty stuff and wandering aimlessly like tourists.

What a great time we are having so far. I'm sure I'll be posting more later as long as the battery in my phone holds up...