Hello from cold cold cold St. Louis!

As many of you (but not all of you) know I'm here in St. Louis for the 2000 NCAA Wrestling Championships (which has a web site but I don't feel like linking to it). It's been one hell of a trip so far!

First of all I didn't even lose my bags at the airport! Of course I drove up here so there was really no reason for me to lose my bags at the airport. But that's neither here nor there. The fact remains that I didn't lose my bags at the airport!

I left at 6:45 Wednesday morning and got here about 7:00 that night. I drove the whole way for 12 hours and when I got here I vowed I'd never drive again (which was a lie because I've been driving around the whole time I've been here but that's neither here nor there, which is the second time I've used that phrase). Something about driving 12 hours straight makes you tired. It's inexplicable. We drove through Arkansas which from what I can tell is a state that can't graffiti well. All the grafitti on all the bridges and normal grafitti places were things like "Trust Jesus" and whatnot. I guess maybe it's soft grafitti that Jesus would approve of. I wonder if Jesus approves of graffiti if it's done for the right reasons? Hmmmm... Anyway, on the way here there was an incident. About 200 miles outside of St. Louis my Check Engine light came on. The Check Engine light is the car company's way of saying General Protection Fault (ala Bill Gates), which is the way to say we really don't know what the hell's wrong, but it will probably involve rebooting the machine. So I had to find a Toyota dealer before 5:00 in a state (Missouri) that I know nothing about except for the fact that it has St. Louis in it which I am driving to. I finally found one in Cape Gerardo (sp!) and they said it was probably my charcoal canister and not to worry about it until I get back to Shreveport. So now I ignore this bright orange light that shines from my dashboard saying YOUR DAMN CAR IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE YOU YUTZ, CHECK THE ENGINE TO MAKE SURE IT'S STILL THERE (I know it only says check engine, but it is so bright that it actually says that and in all caps too). So I've been driving around St. Louis with my check engine light on and not worrying about it. I look the other way and say to it "I can't see you!" and then I run into things because you're supposed to look where you're driving.

So we (my dad and I) got here and went to sleep and prepared ourselves for the 70th NCAA Wrestling Championships, which is very exciting sounding.

This morning we got up and St. Louis played a joke on us, it dropped like 50 degrees from what it was when we got here yesterday! Hahaha! Boy is our face red! Our face is red because St. Louis was also windy this morning! Hahaha! Note to self: wear gloves and Iowa Hawkeye stocking cap tomorrow.

In St. Louis you don't drive downtown, you ride the MetroLink. The Metro is a train that seats 30 but 700 people get on it. It's actually not that bad, and it is the first time I've ever gotten to ride a train. So we go to the Metro station at North Hanley and there's no place to park. This saddens us tremendously because that was the only place we knew to go. So we bit the bullet and went to the airport. We drove around the airport for several days and finally found a place to park that was approximately 250 miles away from the Metro we wanted to get on, so we walked and walked and walked and finally made it to the train. We then got on the train with the other 15,000 people and rode to the Kiel Center which is where the 70th NCAA Wrestling Championships are taking place.

On a side note St. Louis is a really cool place where you never have to touch a faucet or flush a toilet. They've got cameras or something that automatically know when to turn on or flush or do whatever they need to do. It's a magic town.

The wrestling was exciting and we had fun during the first session in which we got to see about 180 wrestling matches. They run 8 mats at once so you've got your pick of action. It's a rush.

The first session ended about 3:30 which meant we had 3 hours to kill before the next session. So we went to Union Station to get lunch but so did 69,000 other people. So we decided to wait on lunch and instead went to Laclede's Landing to go look at the Gateway Arch, which is, well, a big arch.

At the Arch dad and I went to the Museum of Westward Expansion which was impressive in that it scared me. There were these scary robot-humanoid things that moved and talked and were supposed to be Lewis or Clark or Squanto or the Lone Ranger's sidekick (I can't remember his name) and they moved all jerkily and made facial expressions and talked and frightened small children. I'll probably have nightmares. There were also big scary buffaloes which thank God didn't talk or move. There were also lots of pictures of dead people. The most noted dead people were Lewis and Clark. In case you don't know the story of Lewis and Clark (for shame) they were two dead people who came to St. Louis looking for hamburgers, which is why they stopped at this big arch. They saw it from far off and thought it maybe the golden arches and they would stop and get a bite to eat but when they got here they realized it was only a single non-golden arch and Lewis got all pissed off at Clark and hit him with a buffalo. So Lewis and Clark went all over North America and the Missouri River and the Mississippi River all the way to the Pacific Ocean looking for hamburgers and never found them. They also invented the phrase "Go west young man" because "there's gold in them there hills." Lewis and Clark never got the hamburgers and died in 1807 poor, bitter, hungry men.

After the museum dad and I went and had lunch at Hannegan's Pub. I had a beer and an Irish Stew for lunch because when you're on vacation by God you can drink beer for lunch or breakfast or whenever you want.

From there we went back to watch more wrestling and finally we left and got back on the Metro with 298,000 other people and came home to sleep and update our web sites.

Wrestling continues tomorrow and Saturday, so page me and tell me hi so I won't feel all lonely in this big scary town with talking buffaloes and Lone Ranger sidekicks.