Red(bird), White, and Blue

4th of July started with an early morning departure for St. Louis. We arrived in town a bit before noon, and since the hotel couldn’t take us yet, we headed straight for the 1:15 game (Cardinals vs. Brewers).
Blessed cloud cover persisted for most of the afternoon, so while it was extremely humid and hot, we were not sitting in direct sun. We had seats in the bleachers, but these were assigned so we were free to explore and roam around the fairly new Busch stadium. Overall, it’s pretty nice – big without feeling as huge as in Cincinnati, nicely organized, etc. The whole place is a bit bland, though. The food is mostly the same thing over and over again, with few options, and there’s not a lot of personality – while Houston has a train full of oranges and Cincinnati has a YMCA-dancing grounds crew, St. Louis has… hmm… Fredbird the Redbird tries, but I’m not buying.
Due to the holiday, they enlisted some Air Force recruits before the game, which was kind of cool, but then they had a (not exceptional) instrumental solo for “God Bless America” and the National Anthem. That was a bit disappointing, as was the weird female acapella rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the 7th inning stretch. The stadium is nice and comfortable, but overall, a solid “B.”

Our home-team winning streak extended to seven as the Cardinals took a quick lead over the Brewers and never looked back. We were hoping the Cardinals would lose, but the power of our presence was too much for the visiting team to overcome.

After the game, we walked to our hotel, immediately next door to the stadium. It was a complete madhouse (employees were walking around giving out free beers and frozen custard to make up for the huge lines… a nice touch, although I wonder how they get away without carding people for beer…). We made it through pretty quickly since we had hurried over and then spent the rest of our day/evening enjoying a little down time – we saw some fireworks out the window, but we didn’t feel like battling the crowds and humidity, so it was a low-key celebration.

On Monday, we drove to visit my Uncle Don and Aunt Sue in Seward, Nebraska (they’re the same ones we went to Alinea with last week). We enjoyed an excellent dinner and stayed the night with them before leaving for Denver on Tuesday, laden down with homemade focaccia bread and cake for the journey.

Nope, not another restaurant, just dinner at Uncle Don and Aunt Sue's house...

Up next: the last game in Colorado!