I think you might be getting the point that some of Jim’s somewhat less than excellently good plans have some, well, bizarre reasoning behind them. I’m getting used to it, but I’m sure that most people would stare blankly at him and wonder what he’s really talking about. After we left St. Louis, he said “Look for places to stay in O’Fallon. Now, at this point I’m thinking about 2 year old kids playing ring around the rosie…”OFODOWN” (all fall down in Twoyearoldish. Trust me, it’s a valid language), so I asked him to spell it. He did but I really didn’t get it, so asked again. He said “O’Fallon. It’s Irish, I thought you’d like it”. I had to laugh because he passed up two saint places to get me to an Irish non-saintly place. It wasn’t even really Irish.
We spent the night at a Hilton Garden Inn. It was pretty classy, so classy, in fact, that for all practical purposes, they made the lobby look like they served a free continental breakfast when in reality they charged a hefty price for breakfast. I mean they actually had those nifty plastic dome things for pastries and stacks of little boxes of cereal and milk pitchers right next to the coffee thermoses.
When we got done checking in the clerk said “Because you have Hilton Honors, you’re entitled to 2 complimentary bottles of water. Do you want them now, or later?” Of course, I took them right then, after I figured out that they weren’t going to even give me some powdered scrambled eggs for breakfast. The room was very, very nice so I can’t complain too hard. I’m still working on my hotel rating system so we’ll get to that later.
In O’Fallon we decided to go all out for dinner and head for the Outback Steakhouse. I’ve usually had very good experiences with Outback and ordered my usual prime rib. No one should be able to mess up a prime rib medium rare. That was the toughest, stringiest prime rib I ever tasted. That’s all I did…taste it. There was no way I could chew it. The staff was very nice about it and got me something else and gave me a free piece of key lime pie. They also listened to me talk about the EXCELLENTLY GOOD PLAN as opposed to less than excellently good plan much to Jim’s irritation.
Here’s a photo of Jim and Duck in the lobby of the O’Fallon Hilton Garden Inn:
