Saturday, June 26, 2010

One more day...

Tuesday morning we slept in until 10am! That is a record for me. At least since college. Just in time to shower before meeting my aunt. She graciously toured Mr. Kummerow and I through St. Louis in the scalding heat. Our original plan was all outdoor...botanical gardens, new statue park, etc. Well, the weather changed all that. The evening before we sat around the dinner table and created our "to-do" list.
  • lunch at Osage
  • Basilica
  • Straub's
  • Art Museum
  • Sasha's- scratch that- Venice Cafe
Beginning with lunch at Cafe Osage. Osage is a garden/nursery and all their food is grown fresh right there. I had the Mediterranean plate with no goat cheese, extra hummus.












From there we headed to the Cathedral Basilica. My photos do not do the place justice...you must check it out for yourself. Cousin Kim's friend calls it the "largest collection of mosaics IN THE WORLD". Well he is not far off. It is gorgeous!

Next Straub's. Yes Straub's is a local neighborhood grocery store. In case you haven't realized yet, I am obsessed with grocery stores. Alex and I have "grocery store dates" even! So Aunt Judy kindly gave us a tour of their store. It was wonderful and local and we got tons of food for our trip home on Wednesday including more bananas and bakery fresh bread for our PB&Bs, hummus, seaweed salad and nectarines.

The Art Museum was next on the list. The great thing about St. Louis museums are most of them are free. You only pay for special exhibits. Unfortunately the Art Museum has some construction, they are building an addition. Therefore many of the exhibits were closed. But we viewed most of the American paintings and a German new media exhibit.

We checked out Sasha's for a snack and were disappointed so we left and headed out to Soulard to Venice Cafe. Venice Cafe is an eclectic mix of...well... everything. The place is full of what may once be considered trash, recycled and reused. It is great! They have quite a cute little menu too...but we were only there for a snack so we tried the fried plantains. Another one of my new favorite foods! Here are two photos of the cafe. Just one of me and Mr. Kummerow. The other is a fence filled with keychains...just to give you an idea of the place.

















Tuesday night we had dinner with some of my college friends. Nikki suggested Pi, a pizza joint in Delmar...Obama's favorite. I checked out the website and discovered they are very vegan friendly and a very "green" restaurant so I was all for it. Well you know how I am with photos...I dug right in before I could snap a shot...but here are the leftovers. Soy sausage and cheese made this a delicious treat for me! The cookie was an unexpected extra. They messed up our pizza...and even as I write that, I hate to because I don't want to give Pi a bad review. But I have to tell you to make you understand just how good their customer service actually is. The pizza we ordered comes on deep dish crust which isn't vegan- they use butter to grease the pan. The waitress let us know we could order it on thin crust but it came out in a deep dish. She was so apologetic, rushed our new pizza out, let us keep the other one and then also bought our table a round of drinks and surprised Mr. Kummerow and I with vegan dessert! These whoopie pie chocolate chip cookies were the best vegan cookies I have ever tasted. I am almost certain she must have made a mistake and fed us non-vegan cookies. But I know that just simply isn't true. The truth is that they were AMAZING! And I can see why this is Obama's favorite. Not to mention their environmentally conscious business practices.

Wednesday morning we awoke early and hit the road. We road straight through listening to "My Sister's Keeper" on CD. Great book and our trip flew by! Thanks for following our "Great American Roadtrip!"

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