In which I muse upon my upcoming trip to Saint Louis, MO

It’s Thursday night. Tomorrow morning I am leaving for the great City Museum Extranavaganza Fest in Saint Louis, MO.

I get a couple of weeks of vacation a year. For the first time, I have a job with “use it or lose it” vacation. If I don’t use it by April, it just disappears. No pay-out, no rollover. So I started to think of ways I could burn it.

I have a friend from high school (Jeff) who has lived in Saint Louis for about ten years. A couple of other friends ended up there too. They have been pestering me for all that time to come down. Somehow or another I never managed to get down there. So I thought that maybe that I could just hop in the car and head south sometime after Christmas.

Then I heard about CMEF (City Museum Extranavaganza Fest). The group in Saint Louis puts together a weekend centered around a visit to City Museum. About 50 people get together and get a block of rooms at the hotel, a meeting room at the hotel, group rates to the museum, etc. I figured that it would be a blast and I could center my trip around that.

A few of my friends around these parts were going to, so it started to make sense to car pool. So now we are going as a group.

This trip will be a blast and a ton of fun. But it’s not really the trip I had envisioned. So I think I am going to make two trips. First, CMEF. Then a second trip sometime in the next few months. That one will be just me. I am not sure why the wanderlust is boiling up in me, but I think I am going to have to listen to it.