The McMenamins Trail

We've got McMenamins passports to fill with stamps and a baby on the way. We've got to hurry!

Our first move was the Hotel Oregon in the apparently unrelated McMinnville, Oregon.

This place had particularly cool artwork inside, even among the very high bar that McMenamins has set.

They went all out with the walnut motif.

Look at all those beautiful stamps. I briefly considered breaking in here tonight, not to steal anything, but just for the glorious passport stamping opportunities.

I don't think we even bought anything at McMenamins High Street Brewery & Cafe. They are pretty nice and understanding of passport junkies throughout the McMenamins empire, I will say.

The McMenamins East 19th Street Café in Eugene, OR.

We completed a passport page at the McMenamins Roseburg Station Pub & Brewery and walked away with some cool railroad themed tshirts. About half of my clothing is free tshirts at this point.

Lydia somehow convinced me that I needed to buy the largest box of chocolates west of the Mississippi. She's a real trickster, that one.

A lot of the cool kids were at McMenamins on Monroe in Corvallis, OR, which is also home to Oregon State University.

McMenamins has a knack for creative plumbing. It's worth having a few beers just for the trip to the bathroom.

Sometimes I wish I was back in my college days, so I could do things like star in a school play version of The Oregon Trail. "Jane’s trapped in her middle school computer lab playing “The Oregon Trail” for what feels like hours. The game becomes life and rips us back to the trail, 1848, where we travel in a covered wagon with Jane’s great-great-grandmother."

2020 STL Women's March

We started off our day attending the 2020 STL Women's March. One nice thing about living downtown is that all of the political marches happen there so it's really convenient to walk over and raise a ruckus.

Some shots of me marching like a real American hero made it onto the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website.

After the march we popped into the Old Courthouse across the street. It is part of the Gateway Arch National Park and has a lot of good history. When it was completed in 1864 it was the tallest building in Missouri. Slave auctions took place here as well as the Dred Scott case, where Scott sued for his freedom because he had been transported from Missouri to Illinois, which was a free state. Scott lost here and lost again in the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the Constitution didn't grant citizenship to black people regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. The ruling went on to also strike down the entire Missouri Compromise.

Another bit of history that I thought was interesting was that the land that the courthouse sits on was donated under the terms that it was to be "used forever as the site on which the courthouse of the County of St. Louis should be erected." Well when the city left the county the courthouse ceased to be located in the county. So the descendants of the donors sued to have the land returned to them. 

There was some very archy Fitz's root beer in the gift shop.

Lydia was real scared of looking over the railing on the upper floors.

All of that history made us thirsty so we went on a beer sipping war path starting with Bailey's Range.

Played a little Oregon Trail card game at 2nd Shift.

Later in the night we headed to Ballpark Village to watch a sneak peek of Birds of a Different Game, a documentary about the 1980s St. Louis Cardinals.

Afterwards there was a live event thing "hosted by MLB Network's Fran Charles" that featured "a Q&A with Hall of Famers Whitey Herzog and Ozzie Smith and 80's fan favorites Tommy Herr and John Tudor".

The mechanical bull at PBR had seen better days. Sad.

We had some dinner at Drunken Fish and then went home. Busy night!