The kids would have slept all day if I had let them. I, on the other hand, never slept like a teenager even when I was a teenager. As an adult I'm always up early when I travel. I spent about forty-five minutes walking around the neighborhood, basically up and down the strip. I had a bite of breakfast at a Jack-in-the-Box and then made my way back to the motel. By that time a few of the kids were enjoying the motel's own continental breakfast. I joined them and had a pre-packaged individual bowl of cereal that was really more like candy than breakfast food. Called "Cinnamon Toast Crunch", its first ingredient was corn syrup, and three other types of sugar were among the top six ingredients. It was tasty, if not exactly nutritious, and the cover of the bowl set the theme of the day with "Breakfast Quiz Bowl", a set of trivia questions I shared with the kids.
There was one other group of high school students in the motel, and they were having breakfast as we did. The group was a boys' volleyball team whose T-shirts said "Addison High School". Wherever Addison is (I only know it as a street in Chicago), it must be a heavily Jewish area. While they sported athletic clothes on most of their bodies, several of the boys wore yarmulkes on their heads.
I had a message on my cell phone this morning, the first time I've ever had one. The parents of the boy who had gone to the opera with me had called while we were at the opera (needless to say, cell phones are forbidden inside the theatre, and it never occurred to me to check for messages when the show was over). They needed to contact their son about something involving his college registration. I passed the message along to the kid and lent him my phone so he could call home. Unfortunately no one was there when he called.
We left the motel around 9:30, a time the kids found early that I would call mid-morning. Not knowing if there would still be problems on Metrolink, today I chose to drive to the Fairview Heights station, which was well within the unaffected region. It seemed to take about the same length of time to get to as Swansea, and the ride into St. Louis from there was significantly shorter-an added bonus.
Fairview Heights has an incredibly huge park-and-ride, and the lot was almost entirely full when we got there. We managed to find a space clear out by the highway, a brisk five-minute walk from the platform. A train soon arrived, and we made our way without incident to Busch Stadium.
We walked to the Drury Plaza and had about forty-five minutes to kill before it was time for our first game. The kids explored the lobby area (the rest of the hotel is secure; you can't even use the elevators unless you have a room key), and then they sat around a big circular couch and played "telephone" to pass the time. Eventually the game before ours let out and we could go into the competition room.
Our first game today was against Lakota High School, the first school from North Dakota ever to come to the National Academic Championships. Lakota is a small town about an hour west of Grand Forks, and their school would be equivalent to a small rural district in Iowa. After competing against guys in suits from Houston in our first game last year, it was nice to have something a bit less intimidating this time. No one gets to nationals unless they are at least somewhat good, though, so we certainly couldn't take this game for granted.
As we waited for the game to begin I snapped the obligatory formal pictures on the game show set. I had borrowed a digital camera from Sarah Freking at school, and the woman who was working the electronic equipment in the room looked impressed and asked to see it. That woman, Tanya, is the Russian wife of the man who runs the tournament. She is a nut for electronics and does all the technical work for the tournament. I'm pretty sure she thought the camera was a much higher quality machine than it was, for when she looked at it up close she was notably less impressed than she had been from a distance. It's not a bad camera, but it's nothing state-of-the-art. Tanya spoke in terms of mega-pixels, which I don't understand at all. I do know this camera works perfectly well for the stuff we do on the school website and that more detailed cameras create huge files that take forever to download on the internet. This one worked fine for our purposes, and I thank Sarah for letting me use it.
This turned out to be a relatively close game, but we pretty much led from beginning to end. You can substitute between rounds of a game at nationals, and I made a point of seeing that all the kids played. While two of them were technically "alternates", all six of them had qualified and were very deserving of playing. We had a good mix of people this year. While their biographies stressed math team, we had a good variety of skills. For just about the first time ever we had people who could answer English questions, and they also did well with geography and religion (an area that's often not that easy for Catholic school kids, since the questions frequently involve Bible references that are easy for church-going Protestants, but much less important to Catholics). They did okay with art and music, and they rejoiced on those rare occasions when sports or "pop culture" happened to come up. Our glaring weakness this year, as always, was science. In the end we beat Lakota 235 - 170.
Two of our competitors worked for the local radio station, so after the game I gave them my cell phone and asked them to call KLGA with the results. There was one other area school competing at nationals this year, and it was convenient that while bragging about our success they could also pass on the news that North Kossuth had lost by a score of 220 - 165 to Altamont, a school from Birmingham, Alabama. The radio people took the message, and I gather the news was played up pretty big that day.
It was shortly after noon, and the next thing on the agenda was lunch. I mentioned earlier that downtown St. Louis doesn't really have much of a selection to appeal to kids-almost nothing that was priced affordably. We ended up walking to Laclede's Landing, the "entertainment" district that is full of bars and nightclubs. I remembered seeing a "Subway" sign from the train station there, and indeed n the basement of one building they happened to have a Subway sandwich shop and a Chinese take-out place. That Subway was the only fast food I saw anywhere downtown, and just about the only thing that would cost less than $10 per person.
While most of the kids ate at Subway, I and one of the students chose the Chinese place instead. I had rather nondescript almond chicken, but the more adventurous student selected a "sandwich special" at some unbelievably low price. The sandwich turned out to consist of bits of every type of meat (chicken, beef, pork, and shrimp) that were most likely left over from making "real" food. They were breaded together and deep fried like a tenderloin, then served on bread with sweet and sour sauce. The kid (who, perhaps needless to say, felt sick later on today) said he couldn't distinguish one kind of meat from another--it pretty much all tasted like deep fried mystery meat.
The student whose parents had called again tried to get in touch with them. This time he tried calling his mom's workplace. She wasn't there, but the boss was able to explain what was up. While apparently he had missed some deadline in selecting courses, there was really nothing he could do while away from home; he would have to try to talk his way out of it with the people at the college when he got back.
We took the train back to Busch Stadium and checked on tours of the facility. Apparently the last tour of the day had just left, so we wouldn't be able to take one until tomorrow. That left us with the better part of the afternoon to fill and not a lot to do. St. Louis is not a terribly exciting city, and we had plans to see most of the important tourist attractions later on. One minor attraction I suggested to the kids was Charles Lindbergh's plane (or a replica of it, I'm not sure), which hangs in the middle of the St. Louis airport. With no better ideas, the kids agreed that taking the train out to the airport would at least kill a bit of time.
We took the train out to the end of the line and made our way into the airport terminal. Two of the students had never been to an airport before, and they gawked at all the big planes. One of the others frequently flew to visit relatives halfway across the country and could hardly believe how impressed the non-fliers were.
My cell phone rang at the airport. I was so unused to hearing it ring that I hadn't expected it, and the caller had hung up before I was able to answer. The students recognized the number that had called as being radio station KLGA. I called back to see what they wanted. It turned out that their afternoon host often does trivia questions as part of his show. He thought it would be interesting to interview the students and then quiz the quiz bowl team. I proposed the idea to the students, and they agreed it might be fun. We set a time (about an hour and a half later) and proceeded to kill time at the airport.
The Lindbergh plane hangs directly above the entrance to security at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. There's a phone bank and a bunch of chairs on the upper level of the airport, overlooking security. We pretty much killed the afternoon relaxing in those chairs and watching people go through security. Being the teenaged boys they were, the kids couldn't help but notice and comment on the many cute women who passed through the line. Time went remarkably quickly, and before long it was time for the KLGA quiz.
KLGA was supposed to call back to my cell phone. Unfortunately it had been on around the clock for two days straight and was starting to run low on power. I suggested to the kids that we'd do better to call the station from a pay phone. We used a calling card to do that, and got through with no problem.
Bryce Wilson from KLGA did a nice interview with our captain. He seemed surprised that we were spending the afternoon at the airport, and even more surprised when he found out that one of the places the kids were planning to visit was the Anheuser-Busch brewery. That's probably the single most interesting tourist attraction in St. Louis, but Bryce questioned if it was appropriate for underage kids. Our captain assured him that their only interest in it was historical. That's not as far from the truth as you might think. The majority of kids in this group don't drink and make a rather definite point that they are non-drinkers. While at least one of the guys has been known to indulge, his actions seem to vary depending on who he's with--in this group he wouldn't be drinking.
One thing that's kind of nice about having a group from a Catholic school is that no one I need to care about would worry about whether visiting the brewery was appropriate. I'd imagine a lot of public school groups in similar situations might get a lot of flack from fundamentalist Protestants if they took kids on that tour. While there are certainly Catholics who don't drink, no one Catholic sees drinking as sinful the way some Protestants do. They can also distinguish between going on an industrial tour and actually drinking while underage--two very different things.
Bryce asked a lengthy series of questions, which our captain attempted to repeat for the group--even though he was having trouble hearing over the surrounding airport noise. The kids answered the majority of questions on their own, but I did help them out with a couple of them. There were one or two they missed and a couple of others that we would have gotten, except a key part of the question got lost in the repetition. Bryce seemed impressed with the kids knowledge, and when I got back to Algona a couple of people suggested that I must have helped the kids out--they couldn't possibly have known so much. As I said, I may have offered a couple of answers, but the vast majority were from the kids. Indeed, they almost always surprise me by knowing a wide assortment of things about which I am clueless.
When we got back to the Drury Plaza there was still over an hour until our next game. We sat in on the game before ours and watched Chaska, Minnesota totally obliterate Altamont, the team North Kossuth had lost to earlier today. (In the mean time N.K. had been wiped out 340 - 80 by New Rochelle, New York.) Chaska would definitely be my pick for the best team at the tournament. It would be interesting to see them play Ankeny or Ames--the schools that are definitely the best in Iowa, but who never go to nationals.
One of the workers in this room was rather annoying. I forget his name (though he said it frequently enough), but apparently he had won $1 million in a special Jeopardy competition last year. We'd hear him introduce himself three times, and each time he say something like "You may recognize me. (I sure didn't.) Last year Jeopardy gave away a million dollars, and--gee (false modesty)--they decided to give it to me." The guy had a superior air about him in just about everything he did. He scolded students for missing answers he thought they should get right, even obscure things I'd certainly never heard of. He also talked down to the kids and seemed amused at their biographies. For instance, probably the most intellectual person on our team, and certainly the best read, was Mike Blocker. (I know I said I'd try to avoid bringing up names, but you've already read Mike's biography.) Mike has beach boy long hair and a lot of teenaged interests, though. The reader couldn't get past the fact that in his biography Mike said he liked rollerblading. Somehow quiz bowl and rollerblading just didn't go together in this man's head. Pretty much all our team was well-rounded this year, rather than just being classic nerds, but I guess the concept of the Renaissance man was lost on this guy.
The other worker in this room was more what I've come to expect at nationals. He was a life-long radio announcer who had spent some time hosting game shows. Picture a Wink Martindale who didn't age so well, and you'd pretty much have this guy. He was semi-retired now, but he spent some time hosting a televised high school quiz program in West Virginia. Radio people make good quiz bowl readers. My brother Steve is just about the best reader we ever get at the tournament we host at Garrigan, and he's pointed out that his experience in radio helps him out when he reads.
Our second game of the day was vs. Fisher Catholic High School from Lancaster, Ohio. This is an huge suburban school for wealthy people (many of whom aren't Catholic) in greater Columbus. It would be somewhat equivalent to Dowling here in Iowa and even more equivalent to the big Catholic high schools in the Twin Cities area. When they read the kids' bios and asked them a few questions, we could tell that Fisher was in a different world from Garrigan. Our seniors were planning on attending Luther, St. John's of Minnesota (not the famous St. John's), Benedictine College of Ohio, and the University of San Diego next year. That's about as impressive a list of colleges as we ever get at Garrigan, but it seemed trivial compared to the Fisher kids' choices of Carnegie-Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Columbia, and (they were from Columbus) Ohio State. I suppose actually Carnegie-Mellon and Case Western Reserve are just nearby private colleges to someone from Ohio, not unlike Luther is here. They certainly sound more impressive, though.
We got off to a good start and ended up leading for about half the game. I about died when we got to the lightning round and the kids selected "Bible" from among the various categories. I've mentioned before that as a Protestant myself I'm only too aware of what a poor Biblical background most Catholics have. This category turned out to be cute rhyming phrases, each of which was a clue to some Biblical figure. Amazingly, my kids got nine out of ten. Even stranger was that the one they missed was the one you'd expect Catholics to get: the Virgin Mary. We were in the lead coming out of the lightning round. Then, though, came the "Stump the Experts" round, a series of high-value toss-up questions that are supposed to be difficult. They were difficult for our kids (mostly obscure, advanced science), but Fisher breezed right through them. We didn't play badly in this game, but in the end we lost to a better team 365 - 210.
The kids sent out for pizza again tonight. They invited me to join them, but pizza just didn't sound good. I took the suburban out on my own and had dinner at White Castle. Then I stopped at a Schnuck's supermarket and picked up some pop for the kids. Most of the registers at this Schnuck's were self-checkouts, where you scanned and sacked everything yourself. That makes sense to me at K-Mart, where they have security at the doors, but I couldn't help but wonder how they prevent shoplifting with a system like that in a supermarket. Even if they did have alarms at the doors, most groceries aren't embedded with the electronics to activate them. While I, of course, scanned everything I took out of the store, I'd think it would be very easy to let some items pass on by.
After having their pizza, the kids mostly spent the evening playing in the motel pool. I watched TV in my room, but periodically went downstairs to check on them. The first several times they were okay and having fun. The last time, though, there was a problem. One of the kids had jammed his toe into a drain in the pool. It was both cut and stubbed, and like any such injury, the bleeding looked impressive. By the time I went down to check on them they had already gotten a first aid kit from the front desk (they are smart high school kids, after all), and they mopped up the blood all around the pool with towels. After clarifying that the student was not seriously injured, I helped him fill out a mandatory injury report that the woman at the desk had to have as a record of the first aid kit's having been open. Later on I gave him some additional band-aids to change the dressing, as well as some ibuprofen.
Needless to say, that put an end to the kids' fun. They pretty quickly went upstairs and were in bed before long. Everybody, including me, was asleep before long.
I went out walking again this morning. Today I stopped at Hardees before returning to the motel to have overly sweet cereal with our kids and the Addison volleyball team. While the kids gradually got themselves ready I killed time watching the local TV coverage of a 5-K run for breast cancer (or probably against breast cancer is a more appropriate description). Fifty-five thousand people were expected to participate in the event, most walking rather than actually competing in the race.
We drove back to Fairview Heights and found some indication of that cancer run. Even though it was Saturday the park-and-ride was packed, and we ended up nearly as far from the platform as we were yesterday. While we rode into the city we saw jammed trains full of people in pink T-shirts headed back to the suburbs. Once we reached downtown the platforms were jammed with those people, trying to get onto trains. We reached Busch Stadium, and the doors opened. I and four of the kids elbowed our way into the sea of pink T-shirts as they piled on board without pausing to let anyone off. The driver bellowed, "please clear the doors" and almost immediately shut them. Two of our kids were still on board. There was a woman with a baby stroller blocking one of the doors, and in the rush of people getting on, they couldn't get past her to exit. They had reached the doors now, and they were pushing on them in an attempt to open them. There was an emergency "door open" button on the outside of the door. I pushed it, but nothing happened. The driver again bellowed for everyone to stand clear; the train was about to move. I shouted to an employee on the platform that we still had people in our party on board. At first she made it seem as if it were our fault that the kids hadn't gotten off in time, but eventually she saw what was actually up. The employee also tried to push the "door open" button, but still nothing happened. She contacted the driver to let her know there were people who had to exit, but the driver refused to open the doors. Almost immediately the train left the platform-with two of our kids still on board and probably two hundred cancer runners left on the platform.
I lost my temper and pretty much exploded at the woman on the platform. It's unfortunate that it really wasn't her fault; but it really is inexcusable (on both the part of the driver and the idiots who boarded without regard to who might be leaving) to leave part of a group on the train. There's no reason the driver couldn't have opened the doors again to let the kids off, but she just went on her way as if she didn't care about anything. The woman on the platform contacted headquarters, which advised other platform workers to be on the lookout for our kids. Fortunately the kids were smart enough to go down to the next station, and then catch the next train back to Busch. They showed up about ten minutes later.
I'm still rather upset about the whole incident today. In fact, writing this travelogue sparked me to write Metrolink's customer service department to let them know what happened. I don't really expect any compensation (although refunding the cost of our day passes would be a nice way of apologizing), but they need to be aware that they have crowd control problems. After ballgames in Chicago (a similar situation) they always have several employees on the ballpark platforms. Usually one is right at the edge to make sure everyone gets on and off okay. The driver can't leave until he gets a signal from the platform people to go. They really should do something similar during events in St. Louis.
I'd like to use the train problem as an excuse for why we lost our next game--and it may have contributed. Really, though, our kids were just slow on the draw today. We played a team from Nebraska (Elkhorn) that we were probably better than, but our kids were just slow. Several times I could tell they knew an answer, but they hadn't signaled on their buzzers in time. Whatever the reason, Elkhorn ended up being our biggest loss, 445 - 125. Our consolation was that right before we played Chaska had handed North Kossuth the most lop-sided loss in the entire tournament, 555 - 50.
We had two games back to back this morning. Right after falling to Elkhorn we walked down the hall and played Seaholm, a huge wealthy high school (think Ankeny or Bettendorf) from Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. As with Elkhorn, we probably should have won this game. Seaholm was big, but they really weren't that good of a team. (Our kids frequently beat Ft. Dodge and Mason City High, which are very comparable.) Seaholm started out on top, but we caught up and held a lead through the lightning round. Unfortunately, toward the beginning of "Stump the Experts" there was a question about Detroit that people from Michigan would likely know but most other people (including the seven Iowans in the room) wouldn't. That's pretty much luck of the draw; they have regional questions from all over the country, and Seaholm just happened to get the one on Michigan. That one question changed the momentum of the game, though. Our kids played well the rest of the game, but they ended up losing by the equivalent of about three of those "expert" questions, 320 - 250.
That meant we finished 1 - 3 overall, when we probably should have gone 3 - 1. One team got lucky, and another was just faster on the trigger. It's no big deal; this is, after all only quiz bowl. The kids mostly played well, and they knew it.
After the game we went to the International Bowling Museum, which also serves as the starting point for Busch Stadium tours. Two of the kids had no interest in touring the stadium, so they split from the group and went to Union Station, a snooty mall west of downtown. The rest of us paid our admission and made our way through the rather encyclopedic history of bowling. Eventually it came time to start the stadium tour.
I've toured five ballparks now: Camden Yards, Wrigley Field, Skydome, Comiskey Park, and Busch Stadium. Wrigley Field was definitely the best of the tours (even though I'm more a fan of the White Sox than the Cubs), and without a doubt Busch was the worst. The bowling museum was fascinating by comparison. Trust me, if you're in St. Louis with an entire day to kill, you'll find it more interesting to watch people go through security at the airport than to tour Busch Stadium.
We basically saw three things on the tour. First we walked back and back and back to get to the Batter's Eye Club, just about the only novel feature in a very nondescript park. Every baseball park has a "batter's eye", a dark-colored area in centerfield that the batter can focus on so he can clearly see the ball when it is pitched. Sometimes (as at the Metrodome) that amounts to a bunch of empty seats that are just never sold. Other times (like at Kaufmann Stadium in Kansas City) there's a park area that can really be quite lovely. In St. Louis they've constructed the batter's eye out of one-way glass. From the field, it looks like a big splotch of green in the outfield; you'd probably guess it was metal or plastic, rather than glass. Behind that glass, though, is a "club" where rich people pay top dollar for bad seats. For $70 - $80 (other outfield seats cost less than $10), you get a seat, a buffet meal, and open bar. I'm sure it's that last feature that attracts people to the place. You can't see squat of the game from the batter's eye, so going there has to be just an excuse to get drunk.
Next we walked up and up and up and up to get to the pressbox. It looked like a pressbox. At Camden Yards they showed us how they make those electronic effects on the scoreboard, and at Wrigley we got to lean out over the crowd like Harry Carey did for the National Anthem. Here we saw a bunch of phones set up at tables.
Finally we walked down and down and down and down to get to the Cardinals' dugout. It looked like a dugout, a very well-worn dugout for that matter. The Orioles had us reach the dugout by going through the tunnel the players go through, and at Wrigley we saw the players' locker rooms (Sammy Sosa has a whole extra locker, just to store his fan mail). Here we walked through the seating bowl to get to the dugout.
Other ballpark tours have included an assortment of more interesting things. At Camden Yards they pointed out the beverage transportation system, with miles and miles of beer pipes running all over the stadium. At Skydome they explained how the dome opened and closed and how they changed the artificial turf. At Comiskey they took us to the room where the players children are baby-sat during the game, showed us the satellite broadcasting facilities, and took complimentary photographs of each visitor standing right at home plate. At Wrigley they let all the visitors go out on the field, play catch, and run the bases. Here we were told in no uncertain terms that our feet were not to touch the grass, nor should our eyes stray into any unauthorized areas.
Our guide, a college-aged black kid, made this minimal tour all the worse. He rattled off his spiel with no enthusiasm whatsoever, and some of the facts he presented were simply wrong. The one interesting thing happening in the stadium while we were there was a wedding taking place near first base. Three different times people on the tour asked him about the wedding, but he just pretended it didn't exist. If he didn't know who was getting married, he could have at least told us how one might go about arranging such a ceremony. The guide dropped us off at the gift shop. We all immediately exited; nothing we had seen or heard inspired anyone to buy any Cardinals memorabilia.
We took the train over to Union Station, where the other two kids were waiting on the platform. They had done the mall and had lunch, but it was already mid-afternoon and the rest of us hadn't had a bite to eat since breakfast. So we all went inside the mall (a very pretentious mall that's mostly gift shops--no department stores and very few stores that sell anything practical). They had a substantial food court, and everyone had a quick bite to eat. By this point most of the group was getting downright bored with downtown St. Louis, and the group consensus was to just head back to the motel.
The kids basically napped this afternoon. I've never been a napper, though, so I set out walking again. This time I walked eastward toward central O'Fallon. There's really nothing whatsoever of interest anywhere in O'Fallon (my destination ended up being a Walgreen's store, and I went in there mostly because it was air conditioned), but walking around filled the time. I also bought gas at a Quik Trip next to he motel and watched a bit of television. Then, before long, it was time for our evening excursion.
We had made reservations ahead of time to visit the Gateway Arch at night. We drove back to Fairview Heights and took the train to Laclede's Landing, then walked across a vast park that surrounds the arch. Metrolink was too efficient this time, so we arrived with time to kill before our timed tickets were valid. The kids did the dull gift shop in no time, and most of them had seen the even duller museum a few years ago when they were here on a music trip. We pretty much twiddled our thumbs for a while until finally it came time to go up.
The arch is set up sort of like a doctor's office. When the time comes for your "appointment" you think you're making progress, but you really just end up in another waiting area. You kill quite a bit of time in a dull little museum that explains how the arch was constructed, then you kill even more time waiting for the trams that take you to the top to arrive. You spend about another five minutes crammed inside the tram, then finally you're up at the top. At that point there's another wait before you can actually lean against the wall at one of the tiny windows.
Once you finally look out, the view is really rather a let-down. Eastward you look out over the polluted river toward the abandoned factories of East St. Louis. To the west there is the tiny St. Louis downtown (most noteworthy here is the old courthouse where the Dred Scott decision was made) and beyond that more shells of smokestack factories. The arch is really by far the most attractive thing in greater St. Louis; when you're there, there's not much else to see.
After doing the arch we stopped one more time at the Drury Plaza to check out which teams had made the play-offs and see how N.K. had ended up faring. While we don't wish our neighbors bad, no one felt too bad to see that they had gone 0 - 4, losing their last game 280 - 200 to a team from Drummond, Oklahoma. It was also some consolation to see that the teams that had beaten us ended up going on to play-offs. We pondered what might have been for us, and then made our way back to the train.
Bush Stadium station was rather creepy at night. The station is in an open trench below street level, and it is very badly lit. Metrolink uses "honor system" ticketing, so anyone who wants to can come down to the platforms without even having to go through a turnstile. There were no employees in the station, and a group of less than savory young men on the opposite platform made me just a tad nervous as we waited.
Metrolink's trains run frequently at night, but not all of them go all the way to the terminals. After 9pm every other train ends at Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center, where Metrolink has its storage yard. We had apparently just missed a train, and--needless to say--the next one to arrive was a JJK train. I suggested we board and take the train to Laclede's Landing, which would be a somewhat more pleasant place to wait then Busch Stadium. We waited there on a steamy platform as we listened over and over again to the "bus bridge" announcement. Several people on the platform were confused about what that meant, and we explained it to them as we waited. Eventually a train came, also with the destination "JJK". It was supposed be every other train that ended short, but that made two in a row that did. We waited a total of twenty minutes before we finally got a train that would take us to Fairview Heights.
I mentioned honor system ticketing. They do check for tickets frequently in St. Louis. I don't think I've ever been on Metrolink, on this trip or other times I was in St. Louis, when I wasn't asked for my ticket. I had purchased everyone in the group day passes good for each day we took the train. Several times employees asked for the passes, both on the trains and in stations. In fact, while we were waiting at Laclede's Landing, two different people asked to see our tickets. Everything was fine, of course, since we all had our passes. I have no idea, then, why when yet another employee came around the train asking for passes, one of the boys didn't have his. It probably was lost under the seat or something, but he didn't have it immediately in his possession. Fortunately the woman was very kind to him and merely gave him a lecture, rather than the $250 fine that is supposed to be automatic for fare evasion.
It was well after 10pm when we got to Fairview Heights. While our lunch had been late, it was still a long time ago. The kids and I were all famished, and we drove down the strip looking for an appropriate place to eat. We found a Burger King that was all lit up, I parked the car, and we went up to the door. The hours sign on the door said they were open until 11:00, and there were people eating inside, but the door was locked. We knocked, but no one responded. Eventually a girl wearing a Burger King uniform pulled up in the parking lot and explained that only the drive-through was open this late. She couldn't explain why there were people eating inside. Even stranger was what she was carrying. She had gone out to get food for her fellow Burger King employees to eat--food from Taco Bell.
I wasn't going to mess with the drive-through with a suburban full of kids. We kept on driving and eventually stopped at a Dairy Queen that was very much open. It took forever, but the food was good. After dinner we made our way back to the motel and pretty much collapsed.
The kids slept in late today. I was up fairly early and again took a lengthy morning walk. This time I stopped at McDonalds for coffee and then came back for a few more bites of breakfast at the motel.
Whenever I've done these quiz bowl trips, I've made a point of seeing the kids get to weekend mass. I think that as a Protestant I may be even a bit more conscious that they meet their Catholic obligation than some of the other staff members are. Most years we've gone to a beautiful and/or historic church, making it a bit of a tourist visit as well as a religious service. In St. Louis I had assumed we'd go to Saturday mass at either the historic old cathedral or the gorgeous new cathedral there. The kids had sung in the new cathedral when they were her for music a couple years ago, and going back to the motel yesterday afternoon made mass at the old cathedral impractical. So we settled on going to a parish church (St. Albert the Great) in Fairview Heights that we had passed several times on the way to and from the Metrolink station. They had held their annual parish carnival last night, and the parking lot was still set up with tents leftover from that. We found a place to park and made our way past them and into the church.
St. Albert is a large suburban church. The building is round, with the sanctuary covering about two-thirds of the circle. The altar is under an illuminated dome at the center with a cross hanging down above it. Behind the altar the third of the church that isn't sanctuary is separated by a brick wall covered with gorgeous copper and brass artwork. The place probably seats around a thousand, and it was more full than empty for the late morning mass today. It seemed like a large and active parish, with members of all ages.
That made it all the more surprising that the main feature of mass was the priest's reading a letter from the bishop that officially dissolved the parish, merging it with another large suburban church north of here in Caseyville. The Caseyville priest will apparently become the head pastor while the priest from Fairview Heights will be an assistant. They're apparently building a brand new church building to house the merged parish (St. Albert looks to date from the '60s and is in perfectly good shape), together with a new school. They'll be demolishing St. Albert and selling the land for an expansion of a nearby mall. The Caseyville church site will become the location of the new school, and the new church will be built on currently undeveloped land recently bought by the diocese. The homily today really had very little to do with the readings, but instead was sort of a farewell to the parish. The kids were understandably confused by the whole thing. They noted that tiny parishes in our area manage to support themselves, and they wondered why a huge suburban church couldn't do the same.
They were theoretically letting the parishioners vote on the name of the new parish, though the priest all but told them outright hey should vote for "Holy Trinity". That priest remarked that some parishioners had complained that the proposed name sounded more Lutheran than Catholic (which it does to me-it could also be Episcopalian with that name, but not Catholic), but he said that shouldn't keep people from voting for it. Apparently they wanted a name that was completely different from both of the merging parishes (I think the other was Immaculate Conception) and one that no other church in the diocese had. That would narrow the choices, but it seems silly to have the parish "vote" on a pre-selected name-the sort of thing you'd find in a police state, rather than a church that was trying to be democratic.
They closed mass by singing the Trinitarian hymn "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name" (I think it had been altered to "your name" in the missallette), perhaps a final appeal for the new name. Here, as with the rest of the music, I noticed the main flaw in this church: its organ. That's a problem a lot of Catholic churches have; they try to sing resounding anthems to the accompaniment of a wimpy synthesizer. Almost every time we have mass at Garrigan I groan when they haul out an ultra-expensive synthesizer that our music department purchased a few years ago. Expensive as it is, it still sounds like a synthesizer, not an organ. (I'd really rather they used a real piano like they used to use at mass; that sounds better.) At baccalaureate we sang the mighty old British hymn "The Holy Anthem":
Alleluia! Alleluia! Let the holy
anthem rise;
let the choirs of heaven chant it in the temple of the skies!
Let
the mountains skip with gladness and the joyful valleys ring
with hosannas in
the highest to our savior and our king!
It's a gorgeous and powerful hymn that should be belted out to grand accompaniment so it really does rise to the heavens; a synthesizer simply can't do it justice. They had that same problem here as "Holy God" came across as sappy instead of stately and reverent. It made me extremely thankful that my little old church has a century-old organ with ceiling-high pipes that treats the hymns the way they should be. Hopefully the new merged parish in Fairview Heights will get a better organ. Unless they buy a clone of the one in the new cathedral in Los Angeles, though, it probably won't be anything special; almost no new church's organ seems to be.
After church we drove into the city and headed to our last tourist destination, the brewery. I've mentioned already that this was a place where it was good to have come from a Catholic school--it's not like any of our parents will be complaining about the kids touring a beer factory. Indeed, this Fathers' Day most of the boys were scouring the gift shop for things they knew their dads would like.
That gift shop is actually one of the highlights of the brewery. They have everything you could imagine with a beer logo on it, and they sell it all dirt cheap. My bet is that almost everything here is priced at or just slightly above cost. That makes sense, since everything in the store is essentially advertising for Anheuser-Busch. It's amazing, though, that that same advertising sells for "designer" prices in department stores.
I had an interesting experience in the gift shop. I was wearing a baseball cap from the High Desert Mavericks, the minor league team my former student (and former quiz bowl player) Brad Nelson plays for. I chose specifically to wear it, because I knew that this weekend Brad would be back in the line-up after being out two months after wrist surgery. As I was browsing through the gift shop, a man stopped and asked "Is that a High Desert cap?" and then asked if I was from Adelanto, the town where the team plays. It turned out that the man and his wife live in Silver Lakes, the same development where Brad and some of his teammates live. They're Mavericks season ticket-holders, but the last thing they expected was to see a High Desert fan in St. Louis. I guess it really is a small world.
Even if you're not a real beer drinker, the Anheuser-Busch brewery is a fascinating place to visit. It's basically an industrial tour, of course, but it really is interesting. In addition to showing you all the various steps involved in brewing beer, they also take visitors through the ornate stables where they keep the famous Clydesdale horses. Things end up, of course, in a tasting room. Supervising a group of minors and having a long drive ahead of me, I chose to join the kids in having soft drinks instead of the brewery's own products.
We made our way out to the airport on I-70. We had a late lunch (around 2pm) near the airport at one of the northernmost outposts of that definitive Southern chain, Waffle House. As I waited for my food to come, I pondered a mathematical error they have in the Waffle House menu. The menu says you can order your hash browns in well over a million different ways. (I don't remember the exact number, and it doesn't mater-since it was wrong.) In addition to being "scattered" on the grill, Waffle House hash browns can be ordered "smothered" with onions, "covered" with cheese, "chunked" with ham bits, "topped" with chili, "diced" with tomato, and/or "peppered" with jalapenos. The menu suggests you order them "all the way", i.e. with everything; I prefer mine "chunked and covered". As someone who teaches probability, it was not hard to figure out that there are actually 26 or 64. Even if you consider a single, double, or triple order as an additional option, that would still make just 192 different choices-quite a few, but a far cry from a million. The only way I can get a number close to theirs would be if you cared what order the toppings went in (whether the chili was on top of the cheese, or vice versa), which I don't think is an option. I'd love to have someone explain where that million plus number came from.
We went west on I-70 to US 61 and then headed north on Avenue of the Saints. Our last stop in Missouri was at a really skuzzy fireworks stand, where a couple of the boys picked up fairly innocuous (if not strictly legal) souvenirs. We continued north into Iowa and drove on north to Cedar Rapids, where I stopped for gas on 33rd Avenue. We made our way on past Waterloo and on to Clear Lake, where we stopped one last time-this time for a restroom break and a quick bite of dinner. We finally made it back to Algona about 9:30.
I had a nasty little surprise once we got home. As I backed up my car to pull it closer to the suburban, I noticed that one of the tires was flat. The tires were all but new (I'd had a flat tire New Years Day and gotten a whole new set at that time), so I was far from happy. One of the boys tried to help me take the old tire off so we could put on a spare, but no matter how hard we wrestled with it, the old tire wouldn't come off. Eventually we just gave up. The kid left, and I drove the suburban home, figuring I'd try again in sunlight. The next day two of the janitors and I worked to get the tire off. We wrestled with it for nearly twenty minutes before it finally gave way. Eventually it did, though, and I put on the spare. I quickly went to a tire place and got the flat fixed. Apparently I'd run over a nail. I finally went home for good and went on with the rest of the summer.
The background music on this page is the charity ballad "We Are the World".