Weekend Trip to St. Louis- Day One

Last weekend my best friend and I went to St. Louis, MO for the weekend.  She bought me  concert tickets to see Blind Pilot for my birthday and we squeezed as much into this trip as possible!

Friday we grabbed our weekend bags, made PB&J’s and headed up to St. Louis blasting our favorite music and laughing.  When we got up there we planned on going to dinner first, but we got there earlier than we originally planned, so we stopped by the mall and Hannah got a beautiful vintage US map to hang on her wall from Urban Outfitters.

After we spent a little time at the mall we went to a restaurant that was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.  It is called Iron Barley.  It was really cool how you get into it.  You’re directed by arrowed signs to walk through a dark alley, and then into a gated patio and then down these stairs, through the kitchen and down into this basement where you emerge into this bar-type restaurant with red/dark lighting and live music playing!  It was very cool, and there was this awesome blues singer playing named “Bob Bumblebee Kamoske”.  He was amazing we stopped eating about 4 times just to say I really like this guy’s voice!  So we were sure to tip him and we got his CD and it was truly great.  Of course I have to tell you guys what we ate.  We decided to split their Baked Oak Chicken Sandwich.  It’s so delicious is has baked chicken, russian dressing, lettuce, tomato, onion, bacon, and cheese.  It was so delicious, the flavor of the meat was fantastic!  For dessert we had this peanut better pie, but what they didn’t tell us was that the whipped cream had jalapeño bits in it and there was cayenne pepper in the strawberry sauce.  We didn’t enjoy the pepper in it.  The first bite we didn’t notice but after the second bite my throat had a mild burn to it.

I have two complaints about this restaurant:  one was that their menu was very vague.  It said the names of sandwiches and other foods, but didn’t describe them or tell you what was on them.  The other complaint is that they charged you money to leave things off of your food.  Any special order of any kind cost extra.  However, that sandwich was insanely delicious and worth it!

   

After dinner we made our way to Plush.  This amazing music venue that’s connected to a diner where we went to see one of my favorite bands perform: BLIND PILOT.  ** For any indie folk lovers out there, if you aren’t aware of blind pilot, be sure to click on the links below**.  I have some really great pictures from this show, but they’re on my friend’s camera, so I’ll post those at a later date, but their show was amazing, filled with energy and passion for their music.  They all stuck around after the show, and we got the opportunity to meet the bass player and lead singer.  It was amazing.

One Red Thread

Two Towns From Me

3 Rounds and a Sound

That night after the concert we went to get a sweet tea and drove around St. Louis looking at the buildings all lit up, stopping by huge statues and posing with them (one of our silly road trip traditions).  We had decided to sleep in my car instead of staying in a hotel, in order to save us both a little money, and that ended up being such a fun and memorable part of our weekend trip!  We found a Walmart parking lot and parked my car there.  We each had only one blanket and it was about 40 degrees outside, so we were freezing, and I drive a hatchback, so we were a bit cramped, but we loved every second of it!  We laughed for about 45 minutes at how ridiculous we were, but now we’re convinced that that is the ONLY way to do it!  Why would we ever waste money in a city on a hotel?