A year with my sister, a lesson in survival, sanity and/or stupidity: Loving St Louis

Clarksville were quick to get their
sandbags out when the floods came

The Mighty Mississippi

Leaving Hannibal we headed south. We took the scenic route following the Mississippi down to St Louis. The photos really don’t do it justice but a real pretty road to take. Could see the result of some flooding they had in various low-lying areas along the way. The town of Clarksville still had all their sandbags out.

The view from the ferris wheel
10 storeys up was amazing

Then it was into St Louis. We found ourselves an RV park just south of the city to park up for a few days. First trip into St Louis was to visit the City Museum. What an amazing place.

You can sit in the drivers
seat of the bus and open
the door to the 10
storeys straight down

It’s based in an old 10-storey shoe warehouse and factory. At present they have 3 floors filled along with the rooftop and an outside playground and they are continually building new attractions. We spent an entire day just with what they have – imagine what the place would be like if all 10 floors were
filled with the weird and the wonderful. Another great feature of this place – there are no maps. You just wander round exploring.
A lot of the tunnels, sadly for us, are kid-sized so we had to find the boring adult-sized paths around. In saying that though, we did squeeze through a lot of places we wouldn’t normally consider. And of course, we took the stairs to the rooftop.

Clearly we didn't expend enough energy on walking up the stairs,
we got this hamster wheel humming.

Good fun – that’s the museum not the stairs – 10 storeys was quite hard work. Just remember if you visit this place, unlike us in our girly sandals, wear your running shoes. Did I mention we spent all day there.

This dragon was recued from a pagoda that had been built for
the World's Fair in 1904

Jean showing the little kids how it's done

MonstroCity - a 4-storey outside adventure playground

Some of these old chutes from the shoe warehouse days have
been converted into stairs, others into slides

The next day saw us travelling around St Louis to see what the city could come up with to match the City Museum.

Sue finds one of Steve Connolly's spare eyes - how it
ended up in St Louis we'll never know

Happy to report St Louis came up trumps. We started at the Laumeier Sculpture Park that had some weird and wonderful sculptures, some a bit esoteric that got us scratching our heads and thinking either 1) stop taking the drugs or 2) please take some drugs; and some that we had a bit of fun with.

Jean making like a big booger

From there it was on to Delmar Boulevard and the St Louis Walk of Fame. We walked a few blocks but only managed to find a small handful of famous St Louis people that we recognised – Charles Lindbergh, Robert Guillaume, Agnes Moorhead, Chuck Berry and Tennessee Williams among them.

Johnny B Good on air
guitar never sounded
so good

Speaking of Chuck, when Jean was posing for this photo the busker just there changed immediately from his Beatles medley to a Chuck Berry number. Cracked us both up.

Ventured back onto Route 66 with a walk across the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi River.

Such an interesting name, such a long walk, such a scary experience for a lot of people travelling by car across this long, narrow bridge with a 30 degree bend on it. It was named for, you guessed it, a chain of rocks that made navigation on that part of the river hazardous … but that’s someone else’s story. Along the bridge are a few nods to the old Route 66 – photos duly taken.

Taking a break part way along the bridge

Don't worry - we haven't traded our pick up
(red does go faster though)

After lunch we found ourselves within a couple of blocks of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery otherwise known as the Budweiser Brewery.

So naturally we graced them with our presence. The attention to detail on both the external and internal architecture is simply amazing. They offer complementary tours along with $10 tours. We chose the $10 tour where you get 3 samples along the way as well as a bottle straight off the bottling line to take home. There were 4 guys from Toowoomba who were leaving the country in a couple of days and had no way of cooling their freebies so initially declined them. When we got over the shock of Aussies turning down a free beer we conned them into donating them to our worthy cause. Good on ya Aussies :) (that’s a euphemism for they did). We got to see a couple of the Clydesdales too. How good is that!

Exterior shot of the brewhouse

Inside the brewhouse

Relaxing in the Biergarten

Eventually left the biergarten and headed back into the city to check out the Gateway Arch.

630' high at the top
of the Arch

There are pods you can sit in to go up to the viewing platform right at the top of the arch so, of course, we elected to go to the top. Before you enter the pod, they check everyone for claustrophobic tendencies. We can see why.

There was even room for Sue
to squeeze in here

There are 5 of you in the pod and there isn’t a lot of room. The view from the top is pretty good too but, for me, the ride was the most fun.

Shadow of the Arch across the Mississippi
and a rather large barge

Got a recommendation for dinner so wandered down to Big Daddy’s at Laclede’s Landing to try a St Louis speciality – toasted ravioli. They were delicious so if you have the opportunity to try them I’d recommend them. Forgot to take a photo of the food so you’ll have to settle for these two:

Can't have toasted ravioli without a brewski - or two

Off the mainstream tourist track for our next few attractions. A huge

The garden is in the shape
of a butterfly wing

butterfly and caterpillar, a giant waking up & bursting out of the ground, a front garden that has been transformed into a model railway,

A very hungry caterpillar -
Sue about to be devoured

another Mills mall and, saving the best until last, a walk on the site of an old uranium processing plant. During WWII the US government appropriated quite a lot of land (three towns were demolished for this project) just outside St Louis to make a TNT and DNT processing plant.

The Awakening - 70' long, 17' high

During the cold war a uranium processing plant was set up. When this shut down everything was just left where it was and walked away from. The EPA subsequently came in to organise a massive clean up.

Dan's Emerald Forest

Took about 19 years and they’ve done a fantastic job with all the contaminated material contained in, what they call, a disposal cell. The land around the cell has been donated to various conservation and government groups and, while it is still being monitored regularly, is back to how nature originally intended.

St Louis Mills - not
really a distant cousin

Can you tell I was fascinated by the history of the place. We went for a walk up the top of the cell to be confronted by a storm coming in. It mostly circled around us although there was some rain when we got back to the Interpretive Centre.