Day 62 - St. Charles and St. Louis, MO

The day started hot and clear. We ran along the KATY Trail (Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad - The MKT - which became KATY when the rail line was converted to a trail). This trail runs across much of Missouri. The portion we ran goes through old town St. Charles, just west of St. Louis.

We then toured the beautiful, heavily "treed" campus of Lindenwood University (pictured here), the alma mater of Marcia Giske. It is a lovely campus which is growing aggressively in number of students and curriculum.

We walked around the old town of St. Charles which was settled by the French around 1800. Many of the beautiful old buildings, like those pictured here, have been restored and converted to trendy shops and restaurants. St. Charles was the start and finish point for the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806). They returned from their two years out in September of 1806, so the past two years have been and still are busy ones for this small city, with many celebrations and commemorative work done in the parks. We saw many of the exhibits both in St. Charles and in St. Louis in 2004 on a previous visit. We think it is well worth seeing to appreciate the astonishing accomplishments of these two men and their team.

A pleasant but hot afternoon was spent in the Washington University area of St. Louis and then we drove in to St. Louis to the new Busch Stadium for the baseball game. It is a wonderful stadium which just opened this year. The first photo here was taken about 6:15 p.m. We had hot dogs for dinner and were seated in our left outfield seats (good seats in spite of what it sounds like), waiting for the game to begin, when all hell broke loose. Suddenly at our back a tremendous dust cloud swept over the stadium, sending debris flying. Most of the dust and debris was from the adjacent demolition of the old stadium. We were protected from most of it. The ground crew rushed to get the Mylar tarp on the field, and they finally got it down in spite of its billowing in the wind uncontrolled for a few minutes. The Mylar tarp photo was taken at about 7:08 p.m. (I couldn't get my camera out fast enough to snap the ballooning that this thing did at first!) Then the torrential rain hit and it rained for about 45 minutes, blowing hard for the first 15 minutes. Thirty people had minor injuries from the first "gust front", several windows were broken in the press boxes, and some flooding was sustained in the lower stadium levels. The speed with which this storm hit was just astonishing!

After a 2+ hour rain delay and home plate area repairs, the game got underway at about 9:20. We stayed till about 10:30. The Cardinals won over Atlanta 8-3.

We were worried about our RV because we had left the small awnings down. Gary called the RV park just after the first wind, and they said it was a chaotic scene there - people who had their big awnings out lost them. A park employee did put our awnings up in time, and when we returned we found that, by no small miracle, everything was just fine. We never did hear what wind speeds were clocked, but it was a furious storm. The bad news is that it is still hot - only a temporary cooling was achieved from the storm.