St. Louis is pretty cool

I never thought of St. Louis as much of a destination - more a place you "pass through" when you're headed somewhere else. I was a little skeptical when Steph said she wanted to spend a day in St. Louis to explore, but I'm glad we spent an extra day here.

After our great night enjoying the Cardinals defeat the Astros, we had a great nights sleep and a leisurely breakfast at the hotel. We walked down to the Arch and explored a bit. Luckily, no one really wanted to go to the top of the Arch, so we were able to mark that off the list. The lady I sat next to at the Cardinals game last night told me a not so pleasant story about getting stuck on the tram on the way to the top. Glad we were able to get by without taking a trip to the top...

After the Arch, we headed to the Budweiser brewery to do the tour. The tour was nice - very well done. The only strange thing is that there didn't seem to be any employees at the brewery - other than the tour guides themselves. Every part of the brewery we toured seemed to be missing workers of any sort. Maybe the beer oompa-loompas only come out at night...

By mid day, it was pretty hot - mid 90's - so we enjoyed our beer samples at the end of the tour.

We gave the kids a couple of choices for an afternoon activity, and they chose the City Museum in downtown St. Louis. We didn't know much about it, but it turned out to be a great choice. The City Museum is kind of hard to describe - it's a hands on kids museum, but the focus is the creative reuse of discarded materials - lots old iron work, stone work, glass bottles, even some old bank vault doors. It's really cool, but almost a bit creepy too, if you can imagine. Something of a Tim Burton meets Lemony Snickets take on a late 19th century industrial kids museum. Probably a bad description, but maybe the pics will help explain. Anyway, we all had a blast. The kids swear it's their favorite museum ever.

St. Louis had lots of other kid friendly attractions that we didn't get to check out - enough that I would consider a long weekend trip back here to check out a few more. St. Louis has been a pleasant suprise - glad we gave it an extra day.

Today's pics can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/MarionGrayCPA/YellowstoneDay2

After the museum, we headed west of downtown to our hotel in St. Charles county, just accross the Missouri River. After a quick swim in the circa 1975 "Holidome" indoor/outdoor pool at our hotel, we grabbed a quick dinner and are hoping for an early bedtime tonight. Tomorrow we're heading West and then North to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It's going to be a long day of driving, so I'm off to bed.