St. Louis

This week I am in St. Louis, MO for a Cisco Certified Network Associate BootCamp. This trip has only been planned for about two weeks so it has been a rather wild couple of weeks. For the last six months or so doing projects on the wireless network where I work (pnl). I made my intentions of becoming a network engineer known to my line manager who went and talked to the network team who in turn found that they had money to send me to training. The catch was that the money had to be spent and services received by October 1. In case you missed it, Samantha is due September 15th! so it was either now or never. Well long story short we decided this was too good of an opportunity to pass up and we scheduled the trip as quickly as possible.

I left Pasco at 6am Saturday 8/25 (Samantha's birthday!) on a flight to St. Louis with a one hour lay over in Denver, CO. When I arrived in Denver I was told my connecting flight had been cancelled due to mechanical problems. This may have been due to the FAA manditory inspection of Boeing 737s after one caught fire on a runway in Japan.

I was given stand-by tickets for two other flights but they were full so I had to wait until 7pm. I packed light and didn't check any bags so I could get out of the airport quickly, but as a result I had to drag my bags around with me for the 8hrs I was stuck there.

I finally got into St. Louis at 10pm and was picked up at the airport by my good friend Jon Grable who's family has been living in St. Louis for almost a year. We (Samantha and I) were friends with his family while we were in CA and have missed them dearly. After a quick drive around St. Louis, he took me to the house they have been staying in for the last 10 months. It is a beautiful brick 3 story home that has been recently remodeled. Georgeous!

Juanita made me a midnight snack (literally) and we hung out and caught up. It was so fun. I could hardly sleep as I was so excited to see them and thinking about questions I had forgot to ask them.

The next morning I was blessed to wake to the pitter patter of little feet. The Grables have 5 beautiful children including a new baby boy named Jeremiah. So fun to hold such a beautiful little one. Jon made pancakes for breakfast and we all enjoyed them!

I will post more in the next few days including pictures of the excellent food I have been enjoying here in St. Louis.