The Gateway Arch and the City Museum at St. Louis

(Travis)

After some really interesting traffic events…

…we finally made it to St. Louis, MO! You could see the Gateway Arch from I-70 W as we approached the city. The Gateway Arch was constructed as a monument to commemorate westward expansion and the arch shape was chosen to represent the “Gateway to the West”. We rode up to the top of the Gateway Arch in these little pod-like cars, which were still the original ones from the Arch’s construction in 1965. The pods seemed a bit rickety, and we heard rumors from our pod partners that the tracks and pods may actually be corroding…

Either way, we made it to the top of the Arch and were able to look out over the city of St. Louis as the sun was setting behind it. The view was absolutely incredible. After we came back down from the Arch, we both took the time to go directly under the center of the arch and lay under it looking up. It was really breathtaking.

After our time at the Gateway Arch, we went further downtown into St. Louis to visit the City Museum, which is basically like a museum/playground for kids and adults. We had an absolute blast here! Everywhere you looked, the walls/floors/railings were all creatively designed to look like animals or people. There was no real direction to take to see everything in the museum, as there were passageways through rock, passageways through wire you could climb up, and even slides to go down a few floors! Our first stop in the City Museum was a the 10-story slide! Climbing up to the top was a chore, but a fun one at that….and actually took us a bit longer because they had several smaller slides on the way up that we went down ;-)  The 10-story slide itself was awesome.

After the slide, we went outside to play around. They had airplanes you could crawl through, castle-like towers you could climb, four or five slides to go down, a huge ball pit, and many different walkways or wire passageways to crawl through overlooking the city. It’s hard to get a feel for it all without pictures, and Sarah and I have been running into issues finding suitable internet to upload pictures, but I’m sure you will appreciate it much more when you see images.

We ended the night around midnight, and found a campsite near St. Louis for the evening. It was a great day, and we’re sure there’ll be many more to come!