Springfield Mystery Dinner and Entertainment

It was time to leave St. Louis for a more peaceful and legislatively relevant location: Springfield, Illinois.

Lydia liked that the Airbnb had a hammock hanging from the ceiling.

Man... the drive through Southern Illinois is long, flat, and grey. I'm going to blow the mountains a kiss when I get back to Washington.

Upon entering my hometown we stopped for provisions at Cozy Dog Drive In.

A movie theatre that I used to go to is now a marijuana store. 

My mom had some pretty excellent pictures of me as a kid. I wasn't allowed to have toy guns so I just shot everyone with sticks. Pew pew!

I'm pretty excited about my car seat being made out of leather and metal. Kids these days are soft.

We took my parents on a mysterious night of dinner and entertainment. First was food at Indigo.

The second part of the plan was a bit rougher around the edges. I've been wanting to visit the World Wide Technology Raceway just on the Illinois side of St. Louis in Madison, Illinois for some time. I was also trying to think of taking my parents to do something they hadn't seen before. Well I succeeded in my goals with WonderLight's Christmas but I think we may have waited an hour after driving down an hour to get there. I played Seinfeld episodes on my phone to keep everyone entertained.

Pizzelles for Everybody

I got on to some Maker's Mark bourbon ambassador list that doesn't involve too much excitement but I do get a gift from them each Christmas. This time it was come cool bourbon socks.

We bought a pizzelle iron.

And I dazzled Lydia with the cookies of my people.

We even had a family recipe on hand. I need to make these a few more times to see the difference between all the variations.

Later on we checked out some of the lit up fancy houses in Webster Groves.

Candy Cane Lane Redux

We do a lot of walking anyway so we figured we'd hit Candy Cane Lane again but this time on foot. Then we could get some good exercise and see the lights at a more leisurely pace.

We booked our first international flights since the fall of civilization to the Maldives. It's a bit of a gamble that we will be vaccinated by then and that the country and airports in between will all be open. One reason we picked the place is that they've been pretty lax all along so there's less worry of them re-closing. I was happy to put a pin on our map in anticipation. The trip isn't until July so there's plenty of anticipating to go around.

Skipping Down Candy Cane Lane

Candy Cane Lane in St. Louis Hills was impressive both in its Christmas-lightiness and the fact that it had escaped my attention for so many years.

My first indication that Candy Cane Lane was anything more than just a couple houses screwing around was when I started seeing dedicated traffic signs for the event.

I guess the event started in the early 2000s as a friendly competition between neighbors over who could have the most insane electric bill. They raise money for charity too.

Professional sand sculptor Dan Belcher carved this bad boy. In an interview he said that this sculpture would take about three days to complete depending on the weather.

Back home we continued our holy work on the 2020 Christmas Movie Challenge. I was excited to dust off the laserdisc player and put my collection of gigantic Japanese media to work. Sadly my copy of Bill Murray's Scrooged had a crack in it and so was a bust.

My copy of Christmas classic Die Hard lived up to its name, however. Lasers!!

This was our eventual damage done to every Christmas movie that we decided was worth seeing.