busch blasted

braves vs. cardinals

last night we headed down to st. louis to see the 3rd game of the series. 7 pm it's 98 degrees and they just get done throwing out the first pitches. yeah, plural. off in the east a wall of darkness approaches. 7:10 they drag out the tarp and have difficulty keeping it down. poor groundskids. they start dragging out every motorized vehicle to hold the tarp down. gusts of wind stir up dust from a nearby construction sites. a haze covers the stadium.

luckily our seats are covered so we're not too worried about anything. we sit for another 10 minutes. the temperature drops 10 degrees. all of a sudden it starts pouring rain. not that big a deal. a little rain never hurt anyone. kids are playing in it, most of the players are still in the dugout, pitchers are signing autographs in the bullpen. all of a sudden the rain starts coming in from the right. yeah, horizontally. so much for the covered seats. everyone starts running for cover. the field starts to flood.

aaron wants to wait it out. ushers start telling us we have to go below, into the galley area. they are making announcements but we can't understand anything. the winds are blowing hard. i'm a little worried. are they announcing a tornado approaching? we head below. cramming in with the thousands of other fans. it's not as bad as we thought. had plenty of room to move around. when the rain dies down around 8 we decide to head home. thinking there's no way they can play with the field as wet as it was.

we drive out and turn on the radio and hear about the traffic problems on the bridges. tractor trailers overturned, bricks flying off buildings onto the eads bridge. we decide to head to mlk. on our way, we see tree branches in the streets, street lights lying in the middle of the road, construction barricades spewed everywhere. a pretty big storm. we get an hour away from st. louis turn 1240 on and awesome the game's in progress! unbelievable, no monsoon is gonna stop baseball. second time we've left a game that they ended up playing 2 to 3 hours later. if we didn't live so far away, we would have stayed. but we're old, we work and driving home at 1 in the morning doesn't sound appealing to either of us.

deryk and melissa were going to the game as well and ended up spending an hour in their car in the parking lot waiting out the storm. deryk wrote us today and said they're still without power. 102 degrees today...i don't know what melissa did with two little ones. we're supposed to head down there this weekend to see all aaron's med school buddies at deryk's. hopefully the power will be back on by then. crazy evening.

$40 tickets
$10 parking
$20 food
$40 gas

cards win 8-3

i took photos but i haven't located that camera cord...goal for tomorrow: find cord.