DAY 2, Chicago to St. Louis

Left Chicago at 9am for an effort to get to St. Louis in time for a little Arch visit and, or course, Buweiser Brewery tour. Sweet! But let me just say this. Interstate 55, from Chicago to St. Louis, is THE FASTEST road I have ever been on. The locals must have known something that I didn't cuz me cruising, yes cruising...not peaking, at 100Mph was not fast enough to keep up with traffic. Ridiculous...but fun as hell! Got to St. Louis, and my luck, shitty weather, rain, Arch is closed and the Brewery is closed for Veterans Day. Are you kidding me? Crap. So I did neither. Instead, I drove around looking for something indoors to do. I found a great looking mall, 4 stories and plenty of stores. The St. Louis Shoppes...notice the Old English spelling? That must mean classy, right? NO. What I didn't realize was that I was in the ghetto part of St. Louis, it was noon, the mall was almost empty, half the stores were closed down, and the only people there were hoodlum teenagers obviously skipping school in what I could only assume was a competition to see who could mug the most people in an afternoon. Shit. Not wishing to be next, I quickly hit up a Jack in the Box. For those of you not familiar, this is a phenomenal fast food chain that I thoroughly enjoyed. Waiting for my good friend Chris (who's doing some mindless work as a grad student at U of Chicago...something overly simplistic about microbiological airborne spore genomic sequencing) to finish work, I continued to kill time by going to the President's Casino, a riverboat casino near the St. Louis arch. Met up with Chris, hit up an awesome part of town, had some great Thai food, then a cool bar owned by Chuck Berry (Blueberry Hill), played some darts, had a few beers, then off to bed.