A Wicked Good Weekend

Our weekend in St. Louis was grand.
During the drive, we talked, laughed, reminisced, and planned.
We listened to this:

and while Aaron drove, I read this out loud:
Which I give a B+ review. A lot of it is common sense, and a little redundant at times. A good portion is geared toward getting out and staying out of debt, which we thought didn't really apply to us, since aside from a small portion left on our van, and our home mortgage, we are 100% debt free.
But that's aside from our van and our home. So....reading this book made us realize that we are actually NOT 100% debt free. But we want to be. How nice would it be to not have a house payment? I don't know why we haven't discussed it before. It is a doable goal. We read, talked, and made a plan to pay off the balance on the car as quickly as possible.
But whether you have a mountain of debt, a little debt, or are like us and sort of thought you had zero debt because "cars and houses don't really count", debt is debt.
I do not love books of the "self help" genre, but I do love to budget.
This book was a fun read, and it sparked a lot of good "what if" conversations between Aaron and I during our 4 1/2 hour drive. It is a good tool to get you motivated again to revamp our own budget (which we haven't done since we added a kid and Aaron was promoted). Apparently, Dave Ramsey has a popular radio and television show. We'd never heard of it, so I won't vouch for what kind of guy he is, or any of his other material. But we'd recommend this book.

We went here
and did sealings, which we try to do around our anniversary each year to be reminded of the vows and covenants made at our own wedding.

We ate here
and here (is it just me or does the storefront look an awful lot like Panera Bread?)
We had plans to eat lunch on a Mississippi riverboat, but we got there to discover that tours had been canceled due to excessive river flooding.
Question.
They closed the boat due to excess water.
Don't boats, like...float?

We decided to take the "Journey to the Top" of the Gateway Arch instead, since it was closed the last time we visited.

Hahahahahaha, well, all we can say about the "Journey to the Top" is that it is not for the claustrophobic or anyone with a nose. You are led through a creepy damp and dark cement hallway that tunnels 50 feet below the ground. (I started to panic. "um, aren't we only like 100 yards away from the flooded River? Are we below the water table? How strong are these cement walls?")

You climb through a tiny elevator door (about 2' x 4')
and into a Mork and Mindy type pod that holds "5" people.
The "" is because Aaron selected a pod with a 450+ lb tatted up couple with a daughter that did not fall far from the tree. Now, I've got nothing against big people, unless 3 of them want to share a 16sq ft compartment that's carrying me up a 650 ft drop via rope pulleys. Aaron ended up practically in the lap of the dude, who told him about the "hood" in Mississippi where he lives and how "nobody can't get a job and it's a miracle we still alive with all the drugs and gangs". Aaron, being a college sports fan, responds with, "Mississippi huh, what college is near you guys?" They laughed and said, "College?! Don't nobody go to college where we from!" Then he showed us his gang tats on one arm, and the giant cross tat on the other arm and each knuckle. The daughter (maybe 8 or 9) said she can't wait to get back home because "the people up here in St. Louis are rude as Hell". I thought that sounded a little sour coming from a child's mouth, and looked over for a response from the mother, who only chimed, "yeah they are!"

The elevator ride was a long, sweaty 4 minutes.

You would think I'd have felt nothing but relief to get out of the tiny elevator pod, but it turns out that the interior of the Gateway Arch isn't exactly spacious, either.
I learned that it's not small, confined spaces that I don't do. It's hot, stinky, crowded spaces that I have a serious problem with.
It only takes one bad case of B.O. fused with last night's curry/garlic dinner to spoil an atmosphere. There was an entire family in there with us. And it was like 1,000 degrees. Unbearable. We were only up there for about 2 minutes before Aaron came to me and whispered, "I can't hold my breath any longer! We've got to get out of here!"
Barf.
But the view was rad, so we plugged our noses to keep our gag reflexes under control, and took a few minutes to soak it up and take a few pictures.
The experience was breathtaking.


Literally.

The ride back down was much more pleasant, and more spacious.
I'd had enough of what felt like the worst dutch oven in history, so I made Aaron pinkie swear he wouldn't fart in the elevator pod, before I was willing to climb back in there with him. I could just see him doing that and thinking it was hilarious. The view from the arch is awesome, but if you do it, go on a weekday when it isn't crowded, and hopefully, there will be a little more fresh air at the top.

Aaron packed for himself this weekend. He also proved me right, that he should not be allowed to pack for himself. (his bag included deodorant, a toothbrush, a pair of underwear, his suit, and a tshirt). I had an entire bag just to carry tools and products to get my hair straight. We decided that wearing sneakers with a suit was equivalent to pulling a "Kevin" wearing Kleenex boxes to a wedding, so we went shoe shopping and got him a pair of more "suit"-able (hahhaha) shoes for the show that evening.

We had planned to arrive at the theatre an hour early. We realized that with traffic and "emergency" shoe shopping, we hadn't left ourselves time to go to dinner like we had hoped, so we took the only drive through option available on the way to the theater. Del Taco.
There was only one car ahead of us, so we thought it would be fast, but we literally sat at the window after giving the guy our debit card for 22 minutes. I was irritated, and wanted to leave, but Aaron felt sorry for the really sweaty guy inside because the entire place was operating on a one-man show inside...plus he pointed out that sweaty guy had our debit card, so we couldn't just take off.

Parking was a disaster. We had driven over to the theatre earlier in the day to pick up tickets and scope out parking locations, to save ourselves the time/stress of waiting and worrying about it later. The lot we had planned to park in had a pre-pay machine at the exit. Unfortunately, about 200 other people had also just arrived and were in the line to pay. We knew we'd never make it, so we kept driving and after a few minutes, parked in a questionable meter spot, got out as fast as we could, and hauled it down the street holding hands, eating our Del Taco with the other. It was quite a sight.
We hurried inside as they closed the doors behind us and flickered the lights, and we made it into our seats as the curtain rose. Phew! Fantastic.
Even better than we had anticipated.

this theatre. Wow.
It was a whirlwind getaway that went by too quickly, as it always does when we fly the coop. But it was all we needed to be refreshed, renewed, reconnected, and ready to pick up our babies, smother them with kisses, and take them back to our nest.