Spirit of St Louis

This past weekend and a bit of last week I had the privilege of spending time in the toasted ravioli capital of the Midwest: St Louis. I wasn't going to visit the city, so much as to visit friends who live there, but having never been, it was still fun to check things out.

As it turns out St Louis has a lot of city pride. They have their own style of pizza (which is not likely to ever be heard outside of St Louis), rabid Cardinal fandom, and an insistence on calling Panera's "St Louis Bread Co." Pizza aside, there's a lot to be proud of. Turns out St Louis has a number of wonderful free museums including a pretty awesome zoo. They also have the City Museum which is not free, but totally worth the price of admission.

Here are a few photos of my trip. I realized Sam isn't in any of them, but you'll have to trust that he was there some of the time too.

Friends on the zoo train. It went through some bizarrely long and narrow tunnels, but other than that a good time was had by all. 

I didn't take many pictures of the animals, but I did get a nice one of these two adorable woodland creatures. 

 I feel like before the series of photos on the City Museum, it needs some sort of explanation. It was the one thing I had heard about St Louis before going that I knew I wanted to do. I knew it had a large series of outside tunnels you could crawl through, but what I didn't realize was that the entire museum was like that on the inside as well. Basically the entire multi-floor structure is one big jungle gym for kids of all ages with everything from slides to fish tanks. The whole place actually seems like a liability law suit waiting to happen with very few safety measures and kids running every which way (and weirdly, I mean that in a good way). If I was going to get shin bruises anywhere, this would be the place. And really the only time I almost wiped out (as I wore completely inadequate footwear for the event) was just walking down the stairs to the food court, and that could just as easily happen at a less fun place, like a courthouse or a multi-floored dentist office.

The City Museum!

This is representative of one of the tunnels I didn't really climb through. Heights I can do, but not tight spaces. 

With friends at the bottom of the 10-story slide. Turns out the downside of a 10-story slide is mostly the walk to get to the top of it. 

Outside the St Louis Museum of Art

All in all, I would recommend a trip to St Louis, but especially if you have some good friends there. Thanks for hosting us! We'll have to come back someday to do that arch.