Last year, I tried to go to a St. Louis Cardinals game on September 10. I messed up my planning, didn’t buy my ticket in advance, missed my train into town, and spent the last few innings stuck outside the stadium with no ticket windows open. My only real objective for Tuesday: don’t mess this up again! I even made it easy (?) on myself my staying in the same motel in an Illinois suburb.

As I consulted my map, I decided that it would be fun—and I could make the timing work—to sneak in a minor detour into Lawrence, KS. A friend from high school spoke fondly of it, and I definitely appreciated its charm. I was on a different mission, though. The web technology we use at work is called Django, and it was invented in Lawrence around 2005 (they even had a 10 year anniversary party!) at their newspaper. So I tried to check it out. This is their current location:

But they moved there after Django was created. Back then, they were in an old building that had been a post office and bank — and is now a Blue Cross building.

But a bit further down the block, it looks like it used to be a newspaper (lots of loading docks and a sign related to the World part of the company):

Or maybe the Django team was across the street—the Journal-World used to own the TV station too.

After all this, I came to learn that the paper is no longer using Django, but switched to WordPress. (Cue “sad trombone”).

I made it to the hotel, caught the train, and made it to the ballpark to see the game. It had an exciting start but the Brewers dominated the Cards, and there wasn’t a home team home run. It’s fun to see the stadium effects when those happen.

In the Seventh Inning, they played a video of the Budweiser Clydesdale team circling the stadium. I hoped that it was an actual thing they did for the games, but it didn’t turn out to be that way.

On the way back to the train, I stopped to get a quick night photo of a more famous Eero Saarinen design than the church:

The spotlight wash on the Arch was cool and made it look almost like there was water flowing.

All in all, a good day!