Drive for the Cure Baseball Trip: St Louis Recap

Nate and I woke up at 4:30 a.m. for our long day of travel to St. Louis. I drove the first four and a half hours and Nate took over the second four and half. Nathan completely failed during the early morning. As we walked to the car he dropped several items; at the car he took literally about 15 minutes to put some clothes in his bag, then we stopped at a gas station just outside of Dallas to get ice for the cooler, he dropped the cooler and spilled some of the ice…..needless to say he struggled. The drive to St. Louis was real smooth. Being early in the morning, the traffic was very light so we cruised through Texas and entered the wonderful vast land of Oklahoma where casinos run rampant. Literally, all we saw in Oklahoma was hills, one huge factory, and a bunch of casinos.

Up next was Missouri where we first had a bad impression of the state seeing how all we saw was tons and tons of adult video stores, however, this would later change when we entered in to St. Louis. I must say that St. Louis is a really cool place. Driving up to the city the older buildings and skyline combined were really cool. Of course the arch was also really cool to see. Nate and I rolled into St. Louis about 3 o clock, so we had some time to spare before we finally got to reunite with our boy Collin at the airport. We decided to go to a local favorite Crown Candy, where Man Vs. Food did a milk shake challenge. Nathan got a chocolate milkshake, and I got a vanilla one. I can speak for Nate that they were seriously the best milkshakes we had ever had. If you ever get a chance to go to St. Louis hit up Crown Candy for sure. After the milkshakes, Nate and I went to our hotel downtown, unloaded all of our stuff, and headed to the airport to get Collin. After a slight delay in his plane, Collin finally got to join us. We greeted him with total manly hugs and handshakes with of course manly deep voices (I think Nate and Collin teared up but I stayed strong of course). We threw Collin’s military bag into the car and headed to the ballpark. We arrived slightly late but in plenty of time to enjoy the awesome ballpark.

As we drove up the park from the highway, we could see into the stadium with a really cool view. Inside the stadium we went up pretty high to some actually really cool seats and enjoyed several innings of great baseball. During the 6 th inning, we decided to all go get some Budweisers since we were at Busch Stadium. We then walked down to the first deck to get a better view of everything the stadium had to offer. Along the way, we saw some bleacher seats in centerfield that were not occupied so we decided to enjoy the action from a much better view (this turned out to be an epic decision).

In front of us sat a group of Cardinals fans, two of which had guitars. They were partying and having a great time at the game. Phil was lead vocalist screaming out in a less then perfect Usher voice several baseball songs that the crowd loved….we of course quickly joined in. As the game continued on, Phil began to really take form. He was partying having a good time when he spotted a younger guy in a Boston Red Sox hat. We quickly learned that Phil is not a big fan of Boston. He believes that Bostonians do not work hard and believe more in Union’s than working 12 hours shifts. He felt this young man was a good person to take his hatred on and began bashing him with funny and witty comments. Nate, Collin, and I were cracking up so hard. Eventually one of the guys that was with this young man and a small group got up and flashed a police badge and told Phil to stop talking and sit down….did this work??….absolutely not!! Phil as well as his partner in crime continued to berate the young man as well as the off duty officer. We all thought something was about to go down, but the officer just sat down and Phil went on cracking everyone besides the young man up. We had a lot of fun at the game. The Pirates ended up winning pretty handily scoring 14 runs and were just crushing the ball. The group Phil was a part of asked us if we wanted to come have a beer with them at their van in the parking lot and we of course obliged. As we rolled up to the wife and kids mini van that Phil owned, we were greeted with beers and friendly high fives. Collin quickly got on the guitar and started owning while Nathan and I held conversations with several of the guys. One of the guys (Randy) asked me what I did, and I told him I taught special education, which spurred a great conversation. His daughter was born with Autism and Cerebral Palsy. We discussed Autism and techniques to help his daughter. It was really cool discussing something we were both mutually passionate about. We as well as Nate then moved on to more trivial conversation about A&M moving to the SEC. They were all Missouri fans, so they were pumped with us about the move. We talked a lot of mess about TU and again enjoyed Phil going nuts about how much he hated the people of Boston as Collin led some songs and had the group singing. Phil would go on ridiculous rants with such enthusiasm. It was fun to watch.

As the night moved on to about midnight the town was getting a little shady, so we decided to move on back to our hotel for the night. Overall St. Louis is definitely a top favorite city of ours. We met some awesome people that shared some great laughs and stories with us. Great success! On to Chicago and glad to have our boy Collin with us. Below our all our pictures that we took. Check them out for sure because we have some really great pictures.