Monday 19 May 2025
Our flight from Boise to Denver left at 10:40am, which is pretty late as far as flights I have ever taken out of Treasure Valley go. Normally, we’re at the airport before first light – one time, actually before the check-in counters opened – so it was strange to not wake up until after 6:00am for a flight.
I love small airports. Everything is close by, and you don’t have the same manic intensity as you see at larger ones. Things are more relaxed. We had an easy check-in and passed through security in plenty of time to get a bagel for breakfast.
Our flight to Denver was fine. Uneventful, even – I napped for a lot of it. The Denver airport is not a small one. Thankfully we only had a short walk to the departure gate for our flight on to St Louis, and we arrived in just enough time to grab some food for lunch and board.
That was where our problems began. It was bumpy after take-off, due to some adverse weather sitting over the nearby Rockies, and bumpy for most of the flight. The captain actually had to divert us due to another band of weather over St Louis – which we later heard was close to tornado-like conditions – which added forty minutes to our flight.
Not the end of the world until everything after that was slow: getting baggage, getting the shuttle bus to the rental car lot, standing in the rental car line…at the end of which we were given a ticket rather than keys for a car, and asked to stand in a long line outside to get our car.
The only problem? There were no cars: a frustrating situation considering we had dinner plans. There was a long line of increasingly-angry people waiting for vehicles that were coming sporadically around from being washed and detailed after being returned. The whole situation was muddled. Staff were standing around talking when they could have been bringing cars around, and the person in charge at first had only been on the job for seven days, as she told us repeatedly. She ended up going off to motivate everyone else to bring cars out.
Thankfully, as a group of three – or a “family”, as the second and more veteran lot attendant called us – we jumped the line because we needed a bigger car, and that’s what happened to arrive. Luckily for us. Not so lucky for the handful of people who had joined the line before us. The most poorly-organised rental car experience I’ve ever had.
Anyway, we made it to dinner with the St Louis Alley crew close to time, eating at a great outdoor seafood restaurant called Peacemaker Lobster & Crab in the suburb of Kirkwood, which is west of downtown St Louis, and was named for James P. Kirkwood, chief engineer of the Pacific Railroad. I ate a Buffalo Crawfish poorboy (sometimes called a Po’ boy depending on where in the country you are eating one), a sandwich originating in Louisiana, on a New Orleans French bread roll cut lengthwise
Really good to see Matt, Jaimie, Brooke, Miles, Paige and Graham – and Dash, their labradoodle, of course – for the first time since 2023. A fun night with a lot of laughs.
What was no laughing matter was the next big storm cell – with a tornado warning – that started getting really bad just as we arrived at our Airbnb. A few minutes later than we were, and we would have gotten saturated getting out.
Looks like it’s going to be a rough night ahead. But good weather for tomorrow night’s baseball game between the hometown Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers. Paige is part of the group of kids singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, which will be awesome to see.
Off to Indianapolis on Wednesday.
kitchtrips 