Midwestern Road Trip - Part 3

 more St. Louis!!

Day 6 continued:

We spent lots of time looking for, and finding, lots of fireflies.  St. Louis has a lot of them.

It was exciting for everyone 

Day 7:  We visited Grant's Farm, picked up Ma2 from the airport in St. Louis and visited Eckert's Farm

We visited Grant's Farm - it used to belong to Ulysses S. Grant

Feeding the baby goats is always fun

Feeding birds - the birds loved Matthew's hat

Emma had fun feeding the birds

We recreated this picture from when Grant was a little toddler and we lived here.  We tried to get Grant to take a picture with a "Grant's Farm" t-shirt, and he cried about it.  Grant used to call it "Mine Farm" when he was little or maybe "Mein Farm"

He did a grumpy face this time

We visited Eckert's - our favorite local farm

Getting frozen custard at Eckert's

Scott laughing at me for taking too many pictures

Day 8:  We attended Scott's retirement ceremony on base, had some tasty St. Louis BBQ and visited the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

Our reason for going to St. Louis in the first place is Scott's retirement ceremony.  Here we are getting ready for it.

And here are bunch of pics at the retirement

And eating some treats afterwards

Scott with his plaque

It was great to be able to go to St. Louis for this!!

Back at our rental house on base - John is getting eaten by the couch

Going out for St. Louis BBQ

Visiting the Arch

Inside the capsule to go up to the top of the Arch

And up at the top - it looks like Grant is pointing at a picture but its a window with downtown St. Louis in the background.

Down at the bottom again - we got to see so much while we were there.

We love you, St. Louis!!

Midwestern Road Trip - Part 2

St. Louis!!!  and thereabouts

Day 6:  We stayed on the base at Scott AFB and woke up early to visit Cahokia Mounds - a native American site nearby.  The visitor's center is down for refurbishment, which was a shame since it was very informative from what I remember.  But we had a good time walking up the grand mound.  We had a great view of the St. Louis skyline from there.

On top of ground mound - if you look real close you can see the St. Louis skyline to the left of Matthew's head.

John was feeling a little sick on this day - and we decided it didn't really warrant a down day. He struggled along as best he could - but there was a lot of resting.

On the same day we had lunch at a favorite place of mine in Shiloh - just a sandwich shop but good memories.

At lunch - Shiloh, Illinois - memories!!

Scott had to go get his picture taken for the ceremony - here he is in our house we were renting.

Scott's professional picture

And later in the day...

The City Museum: One of our top priorities was to see the City Museum in St. Louis.  It is a museum full of things to climb in under and through, indoor/outdoor, dark, underground and claustrophobia inducing crawl throughs.  It's hard to fully grasp what is is like.  It's like a helicopter parents worst nightmare 'cause your kids will crawl through some creepy hole and come out in a totally different room or level of the museum.  It's made of a lot of interesting sculptural things from demolished buildings in St. Louis.  We had fun.

John wasn't feeling so great and got tired.

The coolest stuff in the museum is hard to photograph because its dark - but so many fun and scary crawl throughs - many of them too small or scary for me.

Goodbye City Museum - so fun!

Fitz's Root Beer

After a muggy afternoon crawling through all the things at the city museum we went to Fitz's for dinner, a St. Louis soda shop.  You get free refills on root beer, and can swap for whatever other sodas they have on tap (maybe 6 or 7 kinds - the rest are bottled).

We got an amazing root beer float - they have so many kinds

Lots of refills!!

And we enjoyed some gooey butter cake there too - another St. Louis specialty

more adventures to come