Two Pilots & an LSW: St. Louis

Friday, February 11, 2022

St. Louis

Thursday morning early I was back out, pulling the 340 out, and heading to St. Louis with Dustin and Terry. Dustin had only gotten about 3 hours of sleep the night before, having gotten in from vacation in S. Florida at like 3 am due to airline delays. The guys were heading to MO because of a problem with their St. Louis plant. I got a rental car, a 2021 Ford Expedition, in mint condition. Dropped the boys off at their plant, and then I headed out for breakfast. I ended up in a place in downtown St. Louis, kind of fancy, had good food and decent views of the city. I went shopping for awhile, and then somewhere around noon I went to the hotel, and they told me it would be about 3 pm before I could check in. I was really tired by then, I wanted a quick nap. I'd eaten, I'd driven around downtown, I'd walked around some stores, and now I needed to rest. I also had only gotten about 5 hours of sleep last night, which was more than Dustin but not enough for me. Since I couldn't get into the hotel yet, I sat in the giant Ford and put my head back and halfway slept in there. When I did get into my room, I tried to lay down for awhile but now I couldn't. lol So I looked up a good steakhouse for dinner, and I had lobster bisque that was *very* good, fresh baked bread with three types of butter (regular whipped, herb butter, and blue cheese butter, which sounds gross but really was very good on warm fresh bread). Then I had a chicken dish, baked potato, carrots that I didn't eat because I don't like carrots, and then a carrot cake to go because I do like carrots if they don't taste like carrots and are blended with big chunks of nuts and covered in cream cheese. ;) When I got back to my room, I looked at that carrot cake, and y'all, there was an entire cake in that thing. It had like 6 layers, it was huge, and heavy, and like 6" long. Unreal. I put it in the fridge after staring for a minute. Next up it was time to go watch a movie. I had three choices. "Moonfall", which Steve would like to see too. "Jackass" which is basically the 3 Stooges for 2022, and "Marry Me", with Jennifer Lopez. I figured I'd watch Moonfall with Steve and I can't stand Three Stooges stuff, so I watched a silly romantic comedy, and it was silly and it was fine and I didn't mind it even though you can see most of it coming. It was nice. And there were only about three of us in the whole theater, so I had the place to myself, too. I can dig it. Oh, one of the stores I went into, I was the only person in the whole store, minus the guy behind the checkout desk. I was not within 15' of another human. I had my mask in my hand (they're pickier about masks in St. Louis than most other places I've been lately except NYC), and the guy behind the counter 15' away says "I Need you to PUT your MASK back ON." I seriously thought about picking a fight about it. Not only are we all vaccinated, I'm sure, but I'm more than twice as far away from you as the required 6'. So pith off, buddy. I took long enough to comply that I'm sure he was wondering as much as I was if I was going to do it or if we were going to have a problem here. ;)

Anyway, after the movie, it was late. I came back to the hotel, ate some carrot cake and watched some Olympics, and passed out for the night.

This morning I slept in, ate breakfast in the hotel, checked weather, checked out, drove the car to the gas station to top it off for the return, went to the FBO, paid the fuel bill, asked them to move our plane closer as we were now back in the Back 40 and would have baggage, read a book by the window and watched it spit rain, then left to go pick up the boys in town. They were running late, and come to find out, they hadn't gotten to bed until after 3 am, and were back out there at like 7. Got another 2-3 hours of sleep, they said. That meant Dustin had slept something like 5 hours over the last two days. He still wanted to fly us home, so I sat right seat and made sure he didn't do nuthin' dumb. He didn't. In fact he made a better landing than he did when he wasn't tired. :D I told him it was because he knew he was wiped so he focused more. Our forecast was for 1/2 mile visibility and 100', but fortunately that didn't end up being the case. We also had bad icing, clouds, rain, and most of that was gone by the time they were ready to go because they were running so late. So all in all it was an uneventful flight.