Antiques Roadshow - 7/9/2017

Up this morning at 6:30 and down to the breakfast room by 7:30. Today we try sausage with gravy and biscuits - tasty.  After check out and packing up the blue chariot, we are off at 8:45 to the Missouri Botanical Gardens - a 15 minute drive.  Come to find out, there is a reciprocal agreement between Botanical Gardens, so our Lauritzen membership card gains us free admittance, a $24.00 savings - ka-ching!

I spent half a day last week at the Lauritzen in Omaha, and was amazed at how great things looked.  Now that I see the 150 year old MBG, I see what time and dedication can bring.  No disrespect to Lauritzen, but MBG is amazing. With temperatures again in the mid to upper 90's, we still spent three hours wandering the gardens, taking pictures of plants we wanted to remember, trying to fix in our minds groupings on display, and really falling in love with the Japanese Gardens, although the boxwood garden was no slouch either.

We stopped for lunch and a cool down in the on-site Splink restaurant, for a shared quiche with salad, an iced tea, and a Top Shock white beer. Hard as we tried, the only purchase after two cruises through the gift shop was an MBG baseball cap to keep the sun out of Deb's eyes, and that gained a 10% discount with our membership rights.

By 12:30 we were back on the road, headed to KCMO for our last night's stay at another Drury Inn in Shawnee Mission.  It didn't take long on I-70 for us to become frustrated and nervous.  At Florence, we dipped south to Hermann, Missouri and picked up the Missouri 94 which was the Lewis and Clark trail along the Missouri River and we were quickly relaxed on this two lane scenic highway with almost no traffic.  We cruised along, enjoying the scenery and slower pace until we reached Jefferson City, spotting the capitol building as we reached the Missouri River Bridge.

We transitioned to US 50 and cruised into KCMO on this four lane.  Although traffic picked up considerably as we moved west, there were no semi-trailer traffic.  We finally arrived in Shawnee Mission at 6:00; a longer drive than we anticipated, and tired, but enjoying the day.

We pulled in to the Drury Inn Shawnee Mission in time for the free drinks.  We dropped our bags and headed to the common room for our merlot and we ended up dining on their abundant snacks: salad, chicken tortillas, build-your-own nachos, and hot dogs.

We retired early and spent the rest of the evening doing some work that we had neglected, and then settling in for a Sunday night of PBS.  Another good day on the road.

Antiques Roadshow - 7/8/2017

Our day to shine! We arrived at the breakfast room at 7:15 to a surprisingly good breakfast, waffles, sausage gravy and biscuits, scrambled eggs, sausage and an assortment of fruit and pastries.  We picked some scrambled eggs and sausage and wolfed it down. Then off to the car park with our suitcase of treasures and our paintings and tickets in tow.

The 10 minute drive to the car park adjacent to the America's Center Exhibit Hall was effortless. We had a 9:00 ticket stamp and, together with hordes of other fans, we streamed in to the center bearing our treasures. The AR folks are tremendously organized and there were troops of volunteers all along the way.  We were directed to Disneyland like lines, depending on our ticket times and visited with one another and scoped our each other's offerings as we waited in the line.

As we reached the front of the line, we are directed to generalist appraisers to look at our items and then issue us tickets to each of the 24 appraiser tables, depending upon the type of item.  With our specific treasures, we were directed to Paintings, Asian Art, and Porcelain/Glass. As you reach the lines for each of these specialist areas, you wait your turn and then, offering the specialist ticket for entry into the Set, the ticket is punched and you are directed to another line in front of the appraiser tables.  Our first was Paintings, of which we had two items. One was appraised, although at a lower value than we had anticipated, not worthless but not the treasure we had hoped.  For the other item, which was a pair, we were referred to the Folk Art table, so added another stop to the list.

Next to the Folk Art table, where the appraiser told us we had a nice set, they had not been cleaned (which was a good thing) and they were in original frames.  Again we didn't hit pay dirt, but received a decent valuation.

On to the Porcelain desk where we temporarily stumped them.  It took a bit of time and consultation between the appraisers at the table, but finally decided they were very nice Japanese pieces, not German.  Not a great value but they thought them "very nice."

Our last stop was the Asian Art desk.  Our water color was a stumper again and required consultation amongst the table.  Although they were unfamiliar with the artist and couldn't find him on the Internet, they came up with an age and decent value.  Later, when we returned to the hotel, I did an Internet search and was able to find the artist and some information.  The time period the appraisers picked was correct, and the value they gave appeared in the ballpark - very impressive.

The information the AR team provided as we arrived was that they expected over 5,000 people and between 10,000 to 12,000 appraisals to be provided in this one day.  There were over 70 appraisers in 24 disciplines.  All the appraisers volunteer their time to AR and are not paid for their work. Of course the exposure to a national audience is tremendous for them.

We were done by 11:00 and out the door.  Quite an experience, even though we did not have anything interesting enough to warrant a TV interview.  We met some interesting people, watched a lot of strange looking people (a lot of baby-boomers) and learned that we weren't going to get to celebrate with a quick around the world cruise!

We returned our stuff to the hotel and then struck out to explore downtown St. Louis.  A very clean and impressive downtown. A wonderful City Garden stretching for blocks and leading to the Arch.  As it was 95 F and very sunny, we walked slowly and spent a lot of time moving from shady spot to shady spot.  Around 2:30, we stepped into a nice restaurant/coffee shop for a beet salad, chicken salad sandwich, iced tea and a local stout.  Refreshed, we wandered back to the hotel, logging over 14,000 steps in the heat and working ourselves up to a nap.

We ended the day with our share of free drinks in the hotel lobby, then across the street to the St. Louis Union Station area for a seafood dinner at Landry's Seafood Restaurant. Into bed at 9:30 with an enjoyable adventure behind us.

Antiques Roadshow - 7/7/2017

Today we head out on a road trip to St. Louis for a taping of the Antiques Roadshow scheduled for Saturday morning. We had requested tickets both times the show had taped in Omaha over the years, but never received a shot.  This time we logged on and requested on several shows in the upper Midwest area and were surprised when we won for this show.  Although our goal was to depart Omaha at 9:00 AM, we finally got on the road at 11:06; having to stop at both the local bank for some spendable green, and drop off some outgoing mail for clients at the U.S. Post Office.

This is our first road trip in the Subaru CrossTrek, our trusty (we hope) new blue chariot. Loaded down with our small traveling bags, a large pink suitcase with some antique paintings and porcelain, and a collapsible 2-wheeler with two larger paintings wrapped in a moving blanket, we set off. Of course we were provisioned with water, cheese sticks, some remaining homemade potato salad and a couple of chicken sandwiches on Kiev Pumpernickel rye for snacking. Also some bottles of wine to enjoy in the evening, or to celebrate upon learning we were newly wealthy with our treasures.

Headed south on I-29 with the outside temperature headed to 91 F, we took a hard right at Kansas City onto I-70 and headed across the up and down highway through the rolling, but boring scenery of Missouri.  As we lost the NPR signal somewhere east of KCMO, we tried out our new fangled podcast attempt.  It worked, and were able to listen to a number of NPR articles, but we will need to explore this media at length in order to find podcasts we really are interested in, rather than whatever random articles crop up on the one feed we have discovered so far.

As the navigator dozed, not having much to do as we tootled along the concrete ribbon of I-70, the driver's mind wandered over past road trips.  Locked into speed control on this wide strip of concrete, occasionally having to log in and out of speed as fellow travelers decided to stay at speed limit in the passing lane, I reflected on how different this American way of driving is from the narrow, left side driving of England a month ago.  Although the U.K. limited access freeways are similar to our Interstate system, they seem so much more interesting in their scenery.  I will say that the idiots on the English freeways seemed directly related to their American cousins.

We stopped for a fuel top-up near Columbia, Missouri and then headed in towards St. Louis, arriving on the outskirts around 5:15.  Traffic became heavy as we neared closer to the city, most directly related to a few accidents and the heavy rush hour traffic of a Friday afternoon.  In the 95 F heat, we arrived at our destination hotel, Drury Inn at 6:30.  This is a 7-story former YMCA hotel right adjacent to the Union Station in downtown.  The building has been beautifully rehabbed, and offers free breakfast and free cocktails (but only until 7:00 PM.). We dumped our bags and hurried to the bar for our share, enjoying a double pour of Merlot.

We then adjourned to the attached restaurant, Lombardo's Trattoria, which has been in business since 1934.  We started with a Dirty Martini and glass of Pinot Noir, split an hors d'oevre of escargot in garlic and Parmesan, a salad each (unfortunately over dressed, but tasty) and then split another glass of Pinot Noir and a sausage rigatoni with mushroom, onion and a spicy creamy tomato sauce.  This was an excellent pasta dish which we would gladly try again.

By 9:00 we were back in our room and crawling into a king sized bed, ready to hit it early the next morning for our chance at a money shot.