My food cheating this week, both the kind that I knew right off wasn't worth it, and the kind that felt worth it at the time (and still feels a little bit worth it) have played havoc with me, and I feel lousy. I am, as I said in the past, a fragile little ecosystem. I guess it's a matter of checks and balances as I'm back on the straight and narrow now. A learning process. It's not that I don't want to keep learning….but couldn't I choose the lessons? No? Huh.
Back to the rest of our most recent jaunt. After our night in Cuba, Missouri we headed back toward St. Louis. We stopped in Belleville, which turned out to be an appealing town.
We drove up a road toward Alton. The changes in the area were extreme….going from a seemingly healthy downtown of Belleville to areas that just seemed devastated with empty, decaying buildings, to a congregation of strip clubs to emptiness.
We turned off and headed down another road toward Alton.
Alton was nice…it had a nice little downtown and we found an Irish bar we loved (Morrison's), but I didn't love the building stock like I do in some river towns. We wandered around, took a few pictures. We stopped at Fast Eddie's Bon Air bar because I remembered seeing it on that Food Network Alton Brown special in which he visited Mississippi river towns. Suffice to say it was much more appealing in the show. Not a friendly place, and although I loved the overhang over the bar that showed scenes from cities, it had the unfortunate effect of making you look up and then all I could see was the incredibly thick dust hanging from the gridwork of the ceiling. As anyone who comes to a house concert knows, I am, ahem, not a clean freak, but even I have standards. Eh, it was ok, but wouldn't bother going back.
Our hotel couldn't compete with the Wagon Wheel, but it was nice. We grabbed some dinner from the restaurant and took it up to our room. The next morning we took a few more pictures as we meandered home. As always, there came a point when Ernie whimpered "we're never going to get home," so we got back on the interstate and zoomed home.
These trips do me good.