Alton, Il and St. Louis

October 11 - 12, 2001 - Alton, IL and St. Louis

We slept in and had a leisurely breakfast, and then took a cab to town, as it is still raining cats and dogs - It's only a few blocks away. Tom and Bill went to the library to check e-mail and see if the web page is under control. Bev and I checked out the shops and found them to not be much. Bill and I went over to the Alton Belle Casino to have lunch and look around. Bev and Tom stayed the course looking for antique shops. They took the casino shuttle back to the boat in time to catch a ride up to a local grocery. We shopped like mad fools, got a ride back to the boat - put the groceries away and called the shuttle to pick us up to take us to the casino for dinner, and to play a few slot machines. I had pretty good luck and came away with about $20 ahead, while Bev was $10 behind. The marina had called the grocery store to get someone to pick us up -a very nice perk. It's still raining hard, so we took the shuttle back to the boat in time to catch President Bush's press conference. Isn't he doing a great job? He sure didn't bargain for all this mess. We feel pretty removed even though we have the Fox News Channel on our satellite T.V. to help keep us current. It's hard to think that those terrorists could turn our lives up side down. So scary!

Friday morning Bill rented an Enterprise car and we drove into St. Louis for the day. It's about 35 miles from Alton. The rain finally let up for a few hours. We all went to the magnificent arch and watched the movie about the building of it - very interesting. Bill and I ventured to the top, but only for a couple of minutes, as I found it very claustrophobic, so we left in a hurry. We had lunch and Bev and I took a cab out to a antique shop area, while Bill and Tom took in the Museum. We stumbled across this antique shop that had literally hundreds of antique table model radios - the kind David is interested in collecting. We were so excited to find a potential Xmas gift for David. However, this cranky old man refused to get the one we liked down off the shelf, because he said, " I'm not a monkey and I won't climb up there to get it and not have you buy it". So, I said "I'm very interested and am sure that I'll buy it at your price. I did everything but flag a $100 bill in front of his face and he still was so disinterested that we walked out empty handed and very discouraged. He was a very weird man and was a miserable sob. Bill and Tom finally caught up with us, and we drove downtown to the Union Station Mall, and bought every patriotic item we could get our hands on. We drove back to Alton and tried to get into Fast Eddies for dinner, which had been recommended, but there were thousands of young folks already there, so we left and went to a very good restaurant, Tony's. It was real busy, but we finally got in and had an extremely delicious dinner - One of the best I've ever had.