Home From St. Louis

Underneath the Arch.

I just got home from attending Paul Varner's funeral in St. Louis. It was a beautiful service, and I was glad to see so many people turn up to support his family in this difficult time. I mainly went to support my girlfriend, who was one of Paul's best friends, but I had the chance to learn a lot about Paul just by hearing the stories from his friends, and he was an incredible man.

Even though Paul's funeral was the main reason for the trip, I had a chance to tour a bit of the city, see the Arch, learn a bit about Louis and Clark, visit the house my mom grew up in, and so forth. As usual I ate way too much experimenting with all the restaurants they've got that we don't.

As for recommendations, the Residence Inn St. Louis Chesterfield was spacious and reasonably priced. Cheaptickets.com got us a good deal on the rooms and tickets (American Airlines) even with the incredibly short notice. The only hitch was dealing with Enterprise for our rental car -- they were pretty awful. Getting the car was the easy part, but returning it was a nightmare. They don't have a 24-hour phone information number, and since our flight left at 7am on Sunday morning it was impossible to reach anyone. We needed to drop the car off at Lambert Airport, but the directions we were given were to a building that doesn't even exist. None of the parking areas they told us to go to would accept the car -- they said they only dealt with Avis and Dollar. We were eventually forced to leave the car on the roof of the short-term parking structure near the airport, because the Enterprise emergency roadside assistance people had us driving around for an hour and a half wasting time and gas and we were going to miss our flight. Everything isn't resolved yet with Enterprise, but I guarantee you I'm not paying a penny more than the daily cost of rental.

I'm going to take a shower and read. I'll catch up to you all later. I think I like the revised column format.