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...