Meet me in St. Louis...

Actually, DON'T meet me in St. Louis, because by the time you got here, I'd probably be on my way to Chicago...

But tonight, I'm in St. Louis, at a really cool hotel -- it was converted into a hotel from the Union Station train station, which was in operation from 1895 to 1985. It's very interesting to walk around the hotel (and the adjoining shopping center) and see how much of the old station has been preserved. I didn't get any pictures tonight (because I didn't realize, when we left our room for dinner, how historic and unusual this place would be), but maybe I'll take some tomorrow morning.

We ate dinner at the hotel restaurant, where their specialty was something called a "sauce flight." Ever heard of a wine flight? It's where you can sample several different wines throughout your dinner -- and a "sauce flight" was the same sort of idea. You could choose your entree from several different kinds of steaks, fish or chicken, and then select three different sauces to compliment the meat. I tried chicken with roasted shallot, hollandaise horseradish, and lemon butter sauces. VERY good.

After dinner, we wandered around the shopping center, even though it was closed, just to see what sorts of shops were in the building. (And we were very grateful to see a Starbucks, after driving all the way through Oklahoma and Missouri without seeing ONE today. It was horrible. No coffee. No coffee all day. I don't even know how I made it through...) Even though the shops were all closed, we happened upon a little Union Station museum that apparently remains open all the time. They had pictures of what the station looked like back in the 20's and 30's, and I thought it was really interesting when I saw a picture of the old restaurant (where a dinner cost $1.50, dessert was 30 cents, and coffee was a dime) and I realized the ceiling had the same wooden beam pattern of the restaurant where we'd just eaten. It's the same restaurant, but these days the prices are slightly higher...

By looking through the various pictures, we were able to figure out that most of the shopping center was built on the platform where people would wait for trains to arrive or depart, with one section stretching through the huge train shed that had been behind the station. Most of the hotel rooms were built in another part of the train shed... and the lobby is in the giant hall where, I suppose, everyone would buy tickets and gather luggage and check the clock to see if the trains were on time.

Well, it looks like the laptop is about to run out of battery power, so I'd better post this now... off to Chicago tomorrow... hopefully I'll have some pictures soon...