St. Louis Road Meet - March 15, 2014 at 11 AM

[hbelkins]

Who's between Steve and Gene (behind Sam)? Oh wait, that IS Sam. So who's in the front row wearing the shorts and glasses?

[hbelkins]

I took these pics of the Hardin bridge last spring, when the water was way way way up and IL 100 was under water almost immediately north of the bridge.

[bandit957]

Even if I had been planning on coming, I wouldn't have been able to. I just got my vehicle out of the shop tonight.

It really is a shame you missed such a great meet.

You don't know how great it was. This was truly the roadmeet to end all roadmeets.

It was 14 years in the making, and I feel bad for anyone who missed it.

[bandit957]

Here are two of my group photos from the meet, taken at the restaurant.  The second photo mostly chopped me out, but does include lots of SEND HELP and other signs.  I'll take a shot at captioning them later (I'm still on my way back home) -- Kim, etc., could you help me on some of the names, especially the taller guys in the back who unfortunately were just beyond the reach of my camera's flash?





from left: Tim Brown (bandit957), Steve Riner's wife (forgot name - sorry - sso), Doug Kerr (Dougtone) - behind Tim in top photo, David Corcoran (corco), Jeremy Lance (bugo) top photo only, Steve Riner (The High Plains Traveler), Cody Goodman (codyg1985), Cullen Wassell (Crazy Volvo Guy), Jason Ilyes (jpi), Kim Harvey (kharvey10), Marc Welby (lonestar14),  Steve Alpert (Alps), Sam Scholtens (getmngo), Gene VanDusseldorp, Brandon Gorte (Brandon), Laura Bianca Pruett (Laura), Brian Reynolds (brianreynolds), Michael Gronseth (bulldog1979), Scott Onson (SSOWorld), A. J. Bertin (A. J. Bertin), Oscar Voss (oscar)

hope that helps --sso

I'm looming over people.

[Zeffy]

Nope.  This is from the St Louis side.  St Louis also has some rather sketchy areas.

And I've been to Detroit (quite often); St Louis and East St Louis have both lost more population.  St Louis and Detroit are like any other big city - good parts and not-so-good parts.  ESL is terminally broken, as is Cairo, Illinois (population has dropped from 12,000 to 2,000).

Doing further research on St. Louis, apparently the center of the city is a shithole, along with other parts.

Yes, big cities do have good areas and bad areas, but there are some cities where the bad areas are in a larger quantity than the good areas. See: Camden NJ. 2014's most dangerous city (yet again).

Is the '1000' under Hardin the population count for the town? I thought it would say 'Pop. 1000' if that were the case.

[agentsteel53]

Camden?  who knew?  I never have gotten nearly as weird a vibe from that place as I have from East St. Louis.

hope you guys found some state-named Illinois interstate shields!

[Big John]

Is the '1000' under Hardin the population count for the town? I thought it would say 'Pop. 1000' if that were the case.

Population.  IDOT does not include the word population or its abbreviation in their signs and they round off the number.

[Brandon]

Is the '1000' under Hardin the population count for the town? I thought it would say 'Pop. 1000' if that were the case.

Yes.  IDOT posts these signs for incorporated municipalities on surface streets.  There are none on freeways or tollways (ISTHA does not post such signs).  IDOT District 1 (Chicago area) is a bit inconsistent with some of them due to recent annexations by municipalities, but they're fairly consistent with them in the other 8 districts.  They're always in the format:

MUNICIPALITY
POPULATION

such as:

HARDIN
1000

as in the photo above.  The only one without such signs is Chicago.

A few other examples from Google Street View:

Woodridge: https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=41.772944,-88.070161&spn=0.009298,0.021136&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=41.773064,-88.070202&panoid=iq-u1Bujn7VziC5YrpeqJQ&cbp=12,177.53,,2,1.26
(Note the greenout where the population was changed - explanation below.)

Yorkville: https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=41.608399,-88.438096&spn=0.009322,0.021136&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=41.608265,-88.438012&panoid=kahP5_JYE5e_9icBGrFM-g&cbp=12,354.77,,2,3.59

Illinois municipalities have special censuses when they grow.  This is in part due to how they get money from the state and to determine if they are eligible for home rule (without a special election).  The minimum population for home rule is 25,000.  As they hold special censuses, the population on these signs can and will change, hence the greenout in the Woodridge example.

[Brandon]

Is the '1000' under Hardin the population count for the town? I thought it would say 'Pop. 1000' if that were the case.

Population.  IDOT does not include the word population or its abbreviation in their signs and they round off the number.

IDOT does not always round off the number.  See the Woodridge example in my post above.

[bandit957]

Quite a few bunker blasts were detected during this meet.

[bugo]

Even if I had been planning on coming, I wouldn't have been able to. I just got my vehicle out of the shop tonight.

It really is a shame you missed such a great meet.

You don't know how great it was. This was truly the roadmeet to end all roadmeets.

It was 14 years in the making, and I feel bad for anyone who missed it.

Yes, you should feel bad for missing it.  Despite the clusterphauck, it was the most fun at a roadmeet I've yet had.

[bugo]

Here are two of my group photos from the meet, taken at the restaurant.  The second photo mostly chopped me out, but does include lots of SEND HELP and other signs.  I'll take a shot at captioning them later (I'm still on my way back home) -- Kim, etc., could you help me on some of the names, especially the taller guys in the back who unfortunately were just beyond the reach of my camera's flash?



from left: Tim Brown (bandit957), Steve Riner's wife (forgot name - sorry - sso), Doug Kerr (Dougtone) - behind Tim in top photo, David Corcoran (corco), Jeremy Lance (bugo) top photo only, Steve Riner (The High Plains Traveler), Cody Goodman (codyg1985), Cullen Wassell (Crazy Volvo Guy), Jason Ilyes (jpi), Kim Harvey (kharvey10), Marc Welby (lonestar14),  Steve Alpert (Alps), Sam Scholtens (getmngo), Gene VanDusseldorp, Brandon Gorte (Brandon), Laura Bianca Pruett (Laura), Brian Reynolds (brianreynolds), Michael Gronseth (bulldog1979), Scott Onson (SSOWorld), A. J. Bertin (A. J. Bertin), Oscar Voss (oscar)

hope that helps --sso

I don't see myself.  I think I'm hiding behind Riner.

[jpi]

In that pic I was hiding behind Kim and standing on my toes.

[Alps]

My understanding of how the meet went:

1) Restaurant. We all made it there. Leftovers ended up with Doug, who handed them to me. My belly thanks you all.
2) Catsup bottle. We all made it there, eventually.
3) Waterfront stop. I only know that four cars made it. "1st St." is not much of a street, and the other streets are similarly unsigned and haven't been paved in 60 years. It wasn't the worst view. I heard another car (Marc W) got a better view off of Broadway - probably more easily accessed.
4) Ted Drewes. This is where the downtown traffic really got in the way. My understanding is only one car actually made it there - two others made it close (I was one) and the rest ended up at Chain of Rocks. My car, to my knowledge, was the only one to circle around and hit up the McKinley Bridge US 66 stub south of downtown.
5) Chain of Rocks. We all made it here, though by the time the last car arrived, the first car already left.
6) Hardin Bridge. My car left Chain of Rocks early in order to use daylight, and made it up the ferry and the west side of the Illinois River. We stopped in Brussels (really nice town, incredibly out of the way) and had an hour of sunlight left as we came back down from there, allowing some scenic waterfront driving and some bonus highway mileage along IL 3 and 143 to 159. I believe there were 5 other cars. Three of them hit the ferry, went across, decided there wasn't enough daylight, and skipped the bridge to use the second (toll) ferry to Missouri. Two of them missed the ferry and ended up at the Hardin Bridge anyway, made the stop, and came straight back via IL 16 to IL 255.
7) Steak 'n' Shake. At least 20 of us actually made it there, and enough of us came inside to unsettle the waitstaff. That's when the majority split off to Italian.

This meet, more than any other, proves the importance of written directions. That, and scouting your meet first.

[bandit957]

3) Waterfront stop. I only know that four cars made it. "1st St." is not much of a street,

You might be thinking of If Poo Road.

[Alps]

3) Waterfront stop. I only know that four cars made it. "1st St." is not much of a street,

You might be thinking of If Poo Road.

But only.

[SSOWorld]

Oh there was a lot of poo on that road, only if poo

[kharvey10]

The meet was scouted out ahead of time - MoDOT changed the downtown traffic patterns (taking away our originally planned option of staying on Memorial Drive) the day before and the nice weather meant more people that normal at that parade.  I did what I could to keep people away from Market Street (where the parade was held) but Washington Street was a bigger cluster**** than I had anticipated and there was no parking at all.  Couple of my facebook friends scouted out the downtown area a couple weeks prior to the meet as I was pulling 60 hour weeks on the night shift at my employer - and almost every night off up to the meet had poor weather.  The nice weather cause the parade to draw over 300K people - and the Pumphouse that we tried to get the group photos - the guys had zero problems at that site at the 2012 meet and just two weeks earlier my friend got pictures there without incident.  The other way to get a group photo by the Musial Bridge is the Illinois side of the river and that area along Route 3 is in a very bad area of town complete with adult entertainment places.

Some of the people went back into downtown the following day and had zero problems - in fact MoDOT has not even replaced any of the signage on I-44 past the Musial Bridge.

I tried to put in the plans that Hardin was an hours drive from the Chain of Rocks area.  Still there were couple people that missed the well marked turn to the Brussels Ferry.

The line at Ted Drewes was so long that we used the restroom and left.  The last group that arrived at Chain of Rocks had to stop at the nearby Hardee's to get a snack as a result.

[Alps]

The meet was scouted out ahead of time - MoDOT changed the downtown traffic patterns (taking away our originally planned option of staying on Memorial Drive) the day before and the nice weather meant more people that normal at that parade.  I did what I could to keep people away from Market Street (where the parade was held) but Washington Street was a bigger cluster**** than I had anticipated and there was no parking at all.  Couple of my facebook friends scouted out the downtown area a couple weeks prior to the meet as I was pulling 60 hour weeks on the night shift at my employer - and almost every night off up to the meet had poor weather.  The nice weather cause the parade to draw over 300K people - and the Pumphouse that we tried to get the group photos - the guys had zero problems at that site at the 2012 meet and just two weeks earlier my friend got pictures there without incident.  The other way to get a group photo by the Musial Bridge is the Illinois side of the river and that area along Route 3 is in a very bad area of town complete with adult entertainment places.

Some of the people went back into downtown the following day and had zero problems - in fact MoDOT has not even replaced any of the signage on I-44 past the Musial Bridge.

I tried to put in the plans that Hardin was an hours drive from the Chain of Rocks area.  Still there were couple people that missed the well marked turn to the Brussels Ferry.

The line at Ted Drewes was so long that we used the restroom and left.  The last group that arrived at Chain of Rocks had to stop at the nearby Hardee's to get a snack as a result.

Kim, just a couple of clarifications:
Re: planning - Whoever was responsible for scouting downtown missed the concept that the 1st St. area really doesn't belong on a meet tour. The roads are terrible, even if the neighborhood weren't sketchy.
Re: the ferry - The directions said "the ferry is on your left" - there was misunderstanding that the directions didn't say "turn left and take the ferry", so some people thought it was just to point out that there was a ferry.
Re: Drewes - My car never heard that you had cancelled the stop, we just heard car after car giving up on traffic and heading to the following stop.

[Dougtone]

I'd like to thank Kim for putting on a fun meet over this past weekend.  I had been wanting to explore around St. Louis for a while now and this gave me the opportunity to do so.  It was also nice seeing some familiar faces as well as meeting some more of my fellow roads enthusiasts as well.  I actually just got home, thanks to my flight being canceled yesterday (as some of you may already know) and boarding flights today as a result.

[bandit957]

I had planned a walking tour for before the meet, and I was able to fulfill almost all of it. It even included the old bridge approach on the south end of downtown.

[bandit957]

Re: planning - Whoever was responsible for scouting downtown missed the concept that the 1st St. area really doesn't belong on a meet tour. The roads are terrible, even if the neighborhood weren't sketchy.

That was my FAVORITE PART!!!!!

Why is everybody so against that part of the meet?

[NE2]

Why is everybody so against that part of the meet?

Because awesome hep cats.

[Alps]

Why is everybody so against that part of the meet?

Because awesome hep cats.

Hep or otherwise, those cats were sketchy. That said, the sketchiness of a couple of the roads is really the overriding factor here, especially since my own Baltimore meet sent 32 prairie dogs into hep cat central at I-170.

[Lonestar1974]

PASSING DOUG AT 95MPH IN A TURBO SONATA LOL

So, Cullen, do you like my Sonata?  I'm sad no one mentioned the epic U-Turn I pulled over four lanes of Poplar St. Bridge traffic in said Sonata.