When I was a high school student in the 1950’s, my school had a soccer team. So did most St. Louis schools. For the United States, that was unusual. Now, St. Louis has a major league soccer team and a brand new 20,000 seat soccer stadium prominently (and I mean prominently) placed on Market Street just west of Union Station. And the stadium is being pretty much filled for games.

DC United, the Washington MLS team, is also drawing well. And are many of the other teams in the league. Which brings me to my point……

Throughout the rest of the world, soccer is the biggest spectator sport. It looks like the US is catching up. What does that mean? That means that all these 20,000 seat stadiums will so be obsolete and need to be replaced. Just watch.

On to the next subject. We promised to provide the dessert for dinner at a friend’s house last night. There would be 5 people. We thought a cake would be good and it was suggested that we try the Nathaniel Reid Bakery on Manchester Road. We never heard of it, but we went. It’s a small bakery in a small strip, and its counter is divided between breakfast pastries, which are supposed to be the best, savory things, and cakes. But not normal cakes. Fancy-dancy designer cakes, and you can get individual cakes (I hesitate to call them cup-cakes, but they serve the same purpose) or whole cakes. We hesitated to get chocolate and concentrated on a lemon tart-cake that we thought would go well with a fish dinner. Or, maybe get 5 individual cakes. Or……maybe go somewhere else.

We had passed another bakery, Bello’s, which we hadn’t heard of but which Google likes a lot, and went there. A more normal bakery, their cakes were more normal, but very big. We just didn’t need a big cake like that. What to do?

We went back to Nathaniel Reid. I went in by myself. The lemon cake no longer interested me. But the cake they called Caia (don’t know why), a sour cream sponge cake with a layer of raspberry something and fresh raspberries and white chocolate wafers on the top looked interesting. I took out a second mortgage on our house and bought it. The verdict?

Unanimous. Probably the best dessert in the history of the world. Clean plate club.

Third and last. Century Electric Company was one of the many large industrial enterprises in St. Louis, making electric motors of all sizes in their large foundry and related buildings. Century is gone, but their buildings have now been repositioned as City Foundry, currently the home of a 17 restaurant food court, 14 non-chain shops, an Alamo Theater and Draft House, an entertainment venue and more. The food court places are all very unique, but we stopped at Killer Pizza for our lunch. Perhaps the least exotic of the 17 possibilities, but that doesn’t mean it’s not unique. You ever had a shakshuka pizza (red pepper/tomato sauce, garlic, and two fried eggs)? It was good.

Today, heading west. Hopefully a few good stops before we get to Kansas City.