We were out and about on Sunday. Our first stop was the botanical gardens. There the flags were at half mast, because Stan Musial died yesterday. Stan the Man was a great ball player and a great person too. Saint Louis loved him and we will miss him. I didn’t stay up for it, but Anne told me that the local TV newscast went nuts. After 45 minutes of Musial memorial, they tried to get on with the rest of the news. The sports announcer told us that the Blues hockey team won their opener 6-0 and did you know that six was Stan Musial’s number? Not to be outdone, the weather person announced that the high for the day was 66 °F and did you know that both those digits are the same as Musial’s jersey number? I guess that we should be thankful that there weren’t any hat tricks involving six. There was a pair of cardinals (male and female) in the garden’s Mediterranean House. I think that the male’s photo makes for a nice tie-in.
Anne’s camera battery died and my camera froze up in the cold, so it was time to leave the gardens. Brunch sounded good, so it was off to Local Harvest on Morganford. There are now two other Local Harvest restaurants in town, at the Old Post Office and Kirkwood, but I doubt that those other two locales have the same quota of hipsters as we saw. Anne and I were easily two standard deviations away from the median age of the clientele. Anne had the French toast and I had biscuits and gravy. The two dropped biscuits were to die for, plus they were humongous and could have easily made a meal for two. I could not finish them.
The next stop on our itinerary was the zoo. The zoo is now sponsoring winter events. Today’s signature event was the Penguin Parade. We got our parade spots, an hour before it began. This meant we had to wait in the cold, but Anne took full advantage of this time by mugging with other people’s babies. The zookeepers cooked up this event to boost attendance, but also to stimulate the penguins. This falls under the rubric that anything new and different is good for the animals. The zookeepers seemed rather nonplussed by the gathered crowd, but then had to impromptu double the length of the parade route, but the penguins just took it in stride. They genuinely seemed to enjoy the outing and weren’t particularly interested in rushing through it. The big ones are King penguins and the little ones are Gentoo. The kids of course loved it and me too.
As you can see the crowd was allowed get quite close to the penguins. We were admonished not to reach out and try to touch them, because they might bite. Like one of these perp-walking penguins last year, bit presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on the finger. Afterwards, we toured the new as of last year, sea-lion exhibit. I heard that the sea lions offered to host a future event, a penguin pool party. 😉
You look like you are wearing a tuxedo.
How do you know that I am not?
Wow great pictures! 😀