2 posts tagged “travel”

I'm spending three weeks of my Christmas break in South Dakota visiting my dad and stepmother. It's nice to be here, but it's cold, and it can get pretty boring. I'm up in the Black Hills - about 25 minutes from Rapid City - with no cell phone reception and no cable. At least I have intrawebs.  During the day I sit around the cabin while my dad watches a tv that's always too loud. In the late afternoon, we go about 5 miles down the road to a bar called the Happy Tavern, where I drink cheap beer for a few hours. All is well.

My dad got some hay to attract deer to his backyard (he lives on a mountain in Black Hills National Forest), and there's a rather plump doe out there right now chomping away. By this point, my dad's three dogs have seen enough deer that they just gaze listlessly in the general direction of the beer.

The forest service is burning some piles of wood they cut down this year to thin out the trees in case of forest fire. The smoke has tinted the sky orange, and it looks like snow is dimming the hills across the road. It's looked like sunset for most of the day. It's beautiful here.

I spent the weekend in St Louis with Sneha. She just moved there a few weeks ago.

This is Sneha in her super-cool new apartment. On Friday, we hung around and ate *very* interesting cookies, and she cooked chicken fajitas for dinner.
Yep, that's smoke in the second photo... It doesn't help, either, that she has a super-sensitive fire alarm.

We also took her dog, Shadow, on several walks. It was really cold, so he wore his coat.

Saturday morning, I woke up for a couple minutes and took this photo through the window: A pretty nice view! In the afternoon, once we woke up and got our acts together, we went for a tour of the Anheuser-Busch brewery. It was pretty cool (and best of all, it was free!).

Into the Chocolate factory we went.

Doesn't it look at least vaguely Willy Wonka-ish?

Yep, that's Sneha next to a horse's ass! On we go.

Not only was the brewery tour free - afterward, we got free beer!
The two free samples weren't anywhere near enough, so we decided to go out that night to a great bar in Laclede's Landing. Before we did, though, we got pizza at the St Louis Pizza Haus on Delmar.
We went to the same bar we went to last time - the name involved Bulldog, but I don't remember exactly what it was. We played some pool and then went dancing.

After we got tired of that, we went upstairs and sat down for a while.
On Sunday we went to the St Louis Galleria, and then I drove back to Champaign. What a weekend!