Day 2: Goody Goody Po
After clearing the cobwebs with a coffee from Northwest, Marie and I set out for Connelly’s Goody Goody Diner, a St. Louis institution for over 60 years, for breakfast. It bodes well for a place when it’s packed for breakfast at 10:30AM on a weekday, and even better when the restaurant is the sort that has 12 ways to order one’s eggs on the menu (five scrambled, five fried, up or basted, for the record).
I should have heeded the questioning glance the waitress gave when I ordered the full biscuits & gravy supreme, as the two biscuits and flood of sausage gravy - which had bits of both bulk sausage and links - covered an entire plate. This is not to say that I didn’t come close to finishing it.
I said my goodbyes and made a few stops in St. Louis before heading to Kansas City: REI for a tiny single-burner camp stove and anodized aluminum teakettle (I require, at minimum, one good cup of coffee a day), Dick Blick for some markers for sketching, and Northwest Coffee again for beans and an iced mocha, and turned west on I-70 to KC.
I arrived without incident, met my friend Bill at his house, and discussed everything from Obama’s selection of his running mate to the upcoming NFL season to “Mad Men”, my new favorite show. After a couple of beers, we headed to Po’s Dumpling Bar for dinner. Bill ordered an extraordinary number of dumplings, both steamed and fried, and I added honey chicken to the ticket. All of it was great, but, like breakfast, finishing was not in the cards.
We headed back to Bill’s for another beer and the first half of the gold-medal game in Olympic soccer before I bid farewell and found a hotel nearby, so I could plug in chargers for my equipment and get an early start Saturday, for I will cross the entire state of Kansas and part of Colorado if all goes according to plan.
Next stop: Woody Creek, Colorado, home of the late, great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
