August 6: A Visit with Coach Paul in St. Louis

Paul, Todd and Matt in front of Paul's stylish new Townhouse in a stylish St. Louis neighborhood.

After pulling off to sleep for a few hours near Russell, KS around 1:30 AM I wanted nothing more than to sleep for 6 or 7 hours. that wasn't to be as Yumi gave me a call at 4 AM. Figuring it would take me a while to fall back to sleep I turned the ignition and started east. I was able to drive for about an hour and a half before my eyes started bugging and I had to pull over again at 5:30.

By 8:30 I woke up and started driving again. I wanted to make it to St. Louis before dinnertime and figured we just might make it despite the late start. Traffic was heavy through Kansas City and west through Missouri to the western St. louis suburbs but we were making good time. I phoned the boy's old soccer coach, Paul, so that he could talk me in to his place. I made one wrong turn which required some tricky backing up to get out of but we made it to Paul's by 4:20.

We spent a few minutes chatting in his very cool townhouse before deciding to make the short drive downtown to check out Union Station, now a trendy mall, and construction of the baseball Cardinal's new stadium. Matt thought it was pretty cool that the WTBS semi was there to broadcast the Braves-Cardinal game and decided that he had to touch the trailer. Kids.

Paul said it was a nice day, but to me 90 degrees is not nice when one considers the highest temps we saw the previous week topped out at about 75. We decided to get out of the heat by going to a neighborhood Mexican restaurant. The food was great, I had a Bud Light and we took off back to Paul's to watch some MLS.

We finished off the night by watching some UFC on Spike TV and trying to get comfortable on the floor. Once situated it didn't take long for any of us to drop off.