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McAllister, 59, is a sports talk radio guy in Cincinnati, on the station that broadcasts the Cincinnati Reds and the Bengals. He and his wife, Kelly, came to visit ӣ����Ƶ for a 48-hour weekend trip, and they crammed an awful lot of ӣ����Ƶ into those 48 hours.

McAllister was here once before, in 1985, when he was the student radio announcer for the Butler University basketball team. He broadcast a game between Butler and ӣ����Ƶ University.

He still remembers that the SLU coach was Rich Grawer, that the star player was Anthony Bonner (“a mean, rebounding power-forward,” he says) and “they had a point guard who had to be 5-foot-6 named PeeWee Lenard” — he even remembers how to spell Lenard. He also remembers players Monroe Douglass and Roland Gray.

But he didn’t remember much about the town. So he asked his followers for tips about what to do here.

“More than anything else, Pappy’s Smokehouse barbecue — they said ‘you’ve got to go there,’” he says.

He and Kelly headed to Pappy’s as soon as they came to town, and the line was out the door and down the ramp. While they were in line, he tweeted a picture of the sign.

“People immediately responded, and a lot of them said ‘get the burnt ends.’”

He had never had burnt ends before.

“We agreed when we were done that it was a tremendous recommendation,” he says.

“Holy cow, it was barbecue worth waiting in line down the ramp for.”

As soon as he posted his appreciation of Pappy’s, incidentally, he heard from the legion that thinks Bogart’s barbecue is superior.

For dinner that night, they went to the second-most recommended place, Mama’s on the Hill. It is so popular, they made reservations a month in advance and still had to wait a half-hour to be seated.

Then again, he said it may be the best Italian meal he has ever had — and it was definitely the best lasagna he has ever had. He was especially taken by the ricotta and also by the portion size.

“When they delivered it, I thought it was one of those family meals they bring to the table for everyone to share,” he says. He ate a third of it and took the rest home, where he divided the leftovers in half before freezing them.

Also, on the insistence of his followers, they had toasted ravioli as an appetizer, and it was, he says, as good as advertised.

His wife raved about the chicken modiga. They sat across the table from each other, sampling each other’s food for the whole meal.

“It seemed like the quintessential old-school family-meal restaurant. One of those places the recipe has been handed down 80 years,” he says.

They took in the sights at Grant’s Farm and walked up and down the Delmar Loop, marveling at the stars on the Hall of Fame. They surfed the records at Vintage Vinyl, and checked out the pop-culture collections at Blueberry Hill. They took what he calls the “obligatory picture” with the Chuck Berry statue and decided to cool off from the brutal heat with a root beer at Fitz’s.

Then they looked around and saw that everyone else was getting root beer floats. But they were too full from the barbecue at Pappy’s to have a float, so they stuck with the root beer, unadorned.

And of course they went to the Gateway Arch. Even though they did not go to the top, the experience was still meaningful for them.

“We walked through the park, through the trees, and you see it and you start walking up on it and underneath it, and you touch it, it’s breathtaking,” he says.

Before they headed back to Cincinnati on a Sunday morning, they “stumbled onto” Chris’ at the Docket.

“Holy cow, that’s a fantastic breakfast spot. We ate good,” he says.

Good, in this case, equates to eggs benedict for Kelly and a Gwen for himself — it’s a breakfast sandwich on a bun with eggs and cheese and turkey sausage. They had side biscuits with honey butter and lattes with caramel and vanilla.

As a sports guy, he especially loved Busch Stadium, where they caught one game. He thinks it has an old-time feel with modern amenities, and he loves the way it interacts with Ballpark Village.

“It felt like big-time baseball. It felt like you were at someplace big,” he says.

“Everywhere we went, we were in Reds gear — hats, T-shirts — but the people were so friendly. Everybody was just so cool and friendly: ‘Welcome to our city, enjoy what we have.’”