Spring Break Day 5: St. Louis Rain

Last year during our spring break we were in ninety degree weather, hot and dry and spending a day voluntarily getting wet at Wadi Wadi water park.  This year we are in forty degree weather, cold and wet and spending the last few days dodging the rain.  Ah, the surprises of travel!  Actually, it isn’t a surprise.  We’ve tracked the weather for a week now and expected rain.  However, we just didn’t expect this much rain.

We were played it smart yesterday by spending our evening inside a museum and away from the rain.  Today the forecast was for cloudy skies, with no rain in the forecast until 8pm or so.  Naturally, we trusted the weather guy and so we left my umbrella back in the hotel.  For our morning we spent almost three hours at the St. Louis Zoo under mild forty-five degree temperatures and cloudy skies, just like the forecast predicted.  Which was perfect, since we were outside for most of the time touring the zoo grounds.  Our next stop was for lunch and to tour the St. Louis Art Museum.  But wait — isn’t this indoor activity something we should be doing if the weather turns wet?  Yeah, but we were only there for an hour, so no big deal.  Our next stop was to be the botanical garden, pretty much 100% outside but we had plenty of hours for that.  Actually, no we didn’t.  When we left the art museum, we were greeted to rain.  Not steady, soaking rain.  But rain nonetheless.  So we ditched the plan to tour the botanical garden and instead we took a brewery tour (and free drinks!) at Anheuser Busch.  The rain relented during our visit, and afterwards we had just enough of a dry window to walk around the historic Soulard neighborhood to get some famous St. Louis Ribs.  Unfortunately, the place that was recommended was only open through lunch time.  I mistakenly thought that it was open for dinner.  Dang!  We settled on a nearby taco joint, then walked through some drizzle to the Lafayette Square neighborhood.  We couldn’t quite make our bus connections work, so we ended up just walking back to our hotel and our awaiting Executive Lounge for some light snacks and desserts.

In the end, everything worked out okay.  We are on vacation, so not everything is going to go smoothly.  Lisa has been great to remind me of this fact, since it seems that every time that we wanted to catch the light rail it just happened to pull away as we started walking down to the platform.  It happened right after we got off the Amtrak train yesterday.  Happened when we tried to go to the museum.  And on the way back.  And this morning going to the zoo.   And this afternoon.  That is five times out of five times!  Lisa said that I should just take a picture of the departing train because that is our view from the top of the stairs.  Sure, the wait between them is only ten to fifteen minutes, but that can through bus connection times out of whack.  We lucked out by actually getting those buses, it was just the light rail that we’ve had poor luck with.  But c’est la vie.  I just gotta let it go, laugh it off, and enjoy the time I have to wait because I could be doing something else that is totally not enjoyable, like getting a root canal, weeding the lawn and slicing bags and bags of onions.  Missed my light rail?!  Fine.  So be it.  Raining on my vacation?!  Fine. So be it.  Tomorrow is a new day.  It couldn’t possibly rain again could it?  And I couldn’t possible miss another light rail train, could I??

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