As far as St. Louis goes, I really wasn't all that impressed with the city as a whole. I guess I'm just so used to the hustle and bustle of latenights in downtown. To me, there was really nothing in the city that was open late at night. Thursday was really the only time I had to explore the city, and we took the family that was with us to the zoo, and we drove out to the Loop. I'd picked up a travel guide before, and the Loop sounded like a really awesome place to go. It seemed that the travel guide hyped it up a lot more. It reminded me entirely of my college town's Downtown area. The heat certainly didn't help things along at all. We put aside around 4 hours to explore it, and we were done in about half that time.
As staff for nationals, I didn't really have any problems with finding food, but I know my boyfriend did. I guess we felt so spoiled by the huge foodcourt that was in the Columbus Convention Center, that we just weren't used to having only a small deli in there that seemed to close awfully early.
Even the restaurant at the hotel seemed to close really early. While the Holiday Inn Select wasn't a bad hotel, there were a few things that sort of bothered me about it:
-The walls were entirely too thin. On the second night there, the people in the room next to us were having a party in their room, and we could hear everything.
-Being on the side of the pool was bad. We could hear everything that was going on in the pool from our room. I tried to snag a quick nap on Thursday afternoon before the Nats staff meeting, and that went over like a lead brick because there were a ton of kids in the pool making noise.
-The "privacy" curtain on the pool side. If you had the lights on in your room, and the curtain drawn, you could see right through the curtain. Hooray for using the bathroom every time I wanted to change clothes.
Obviously this isn't something TPCI could be blamed about, as it was far from being their fault when they booked the block of rooms. Sounds like some designers didn't think of the noise and privacy issues that would take place when there's a pool right outside of your room.
Maybe my familiarity with Columbus makes me biased. I typically love every big city that I have ever been to. There was just something about St. Louis that I really didn't like as much as the other cities.