kitchtrips

It’s like a full force gale
An American storm
You’re buried far beneath a mountain of cold
And you never get warm
It’s like a wall of mirrors
You charge `em at full speed
You cover up – you hear the shattering glass
But you never bleed
You never feel the need

                                                                                                                   – Bob Seger

Sunday 26 August

A more relaxed day today – and a nice sleep-in. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m sleeping like a baby right now. Must be these relaxed vacation days.

Hard to come down from the high of two amazing days at the race track, but it’s cool to realise that today is only the fourth day of our trip. The amount of things we’ve seen and done, it seems like we’ve been here for much longer.

Another hot day in St Louis today, with the temperature set to hit about 35 degrees. So sunscreen and a hat is absolutely mandatory when going outside. There’s actually an excessive heat advisory for the St Louis area that lasts until 7:00pm on Tuesday. According to the locals we’ve met, this is pretty unusual weather for this late in summer.

After a relaxing breakfast, we took an Uber to St Louis Airport (about thirty minutes from downtown) and picked up a hire car, a silver Chevrolet Cruze – our wheels for the rest of the trip here. From there, we drove out to Six Flags St Louis, about half an hour from the airport.

If there’s one thing Americans do extraordinarily well (other than sporting events and big-time parades) it’s a theme park. Not just the rides, although they’re very awesome, but the way everything is designed. Six Flags is a countrywide franchise that specialises in jaw-dropping roller-coasters, and there were plenty of those, let me tell you.

I rode pretty much every one that was open. But my favourite was ‘Mr Freeze’s Reverse Blast’ where, backwards, you go from 0 to 70mph in 3.8 seconds, up a 150-foot tower, that turns into an inverted loop as it drops down the other side. Then there’s another loop and you reach the end of the track…only to be shot forwards and back to the station. It’s all over in a jaw-dropping 35 seconds and it is one of the best adrenalin rushes I’ve ever had. It was so good that I went on it twice, back to back.

We had a Flash Pass, which got us to the front of every line, so we’d ridden pretty much everything in the park by around 4:00pm and headed back to St Louis. Went to a great sushi joint for dinner, just down the road from the apartment. It’s been nice this evening to be in air-conditioned comfort after a hot day. The giant TV here has Netflix, and I’ve been watching ‘Friends’ during our limited free time. A relaxing night watching a few episodes of that still-great show before bed.