Meeting the Cousins

We left the hotel and went to Webster Groves and had brunch at Stafford Restaurant where we met up with two cousins of Hardy's.  He had never met these two and Nancy was from his mother's side and Carol was from his father's side.  They both live in that area but did not know each other...now they do!  They were both a delight to meet but we forgot to take any pictures.  How redundant is that! 

After the brunch, which lasted for three hours, we went back to the hotel then started geocaching in the area.  The geo's that we found were in the downtown area close to the hotel and in parks nearby.  One of the caches was a multi-cache in City Garden which has sculptures all over and this cool fountain of dancing water that the kids were really enjoying running through and getting totally soaked and trying to catch the water.  We had to go from sculpture to sculpture and answer questions to get the coordinates of the real cache and sign the log book.  There were two young girls where we signed the log book so we explained what we were doing so maybe they would want to start geocaching too.

Later that evening we went to an Irish restaurant called the "Dubliner" for dinner.  After that we stopped at Jack Patricks which is an Irish Pub.  I asked a young man if we had to go in to order our drinks and he very politely told me that he was just a customer but we did have to go inside.  He wanted to know if we were from there and we told him we were from out of town and there celebrating my birthday.  He bought me my birthday drink! 

Birthday Celebration

This is the big birthday milestone for me.  When you are young you think 70 is really old.  Well, it is old but not really old as I am still functioning, dancing, hiking and all those fun things we do.

The day started off with breakfast in Rolla, then a trip into St Louis to meet up with brother-in-law Jan who is also celebrating the same birth date.  After we checked into the Omni Majestic Hotel, we went to the Scottish Arms for dinner and I had Bangers and Mash along with a glass of wine.  I topped that off with a huge slice of strawberry-rhubarb bread pudding with a gob of real whipped cream.  It was way too much to eat but it was great.

The Omni Majestic is a beautiful old hotel that sat empty for many years and was renovated a few years ago.  The hotel was built in 1914 and had over a hundred rooms at that time.  It now has around 90.  The hotel belonged to ATT&T who sold it to Omni and Omni did the renovation.  This hotel sits right downtown in St Louis and is in a part of St Louis that was really in bad shape a few years ago and you didn't want to drive down there let alone stay.  In the past several years they have done major renovation of the downtown area and the old warehouses now have little shops and lofts and is really quite nice.

Pre Birthday Celebration

Today is the day before my big number 70 birthday and I am totally enjoying still being 69.  There is something about each of those milestones that remind you that life is passing by quickly but Hardy and I do not let any grass grow under our feet because we go, see, do as much as we possibly can.

I finally went over to the "Dark Side" and signed up with a geocaching name so now I go out and hunt for treasures along with Hardy.  I usually went with him but never logged my name.  Because I can usually find these caches, my geocache name is EagleIZ.

We topped off the day with dinner at AppleBees and a glass of wine so the birthday celebration has begun.