St. Louis

Went to St. Louis, MO. Mark was at a conference for a week, but Evan and I joined him the last 4 days. St. Louis... how can I discribe it... the city itself is pretty sorry. You can see they're making efforts to revive downtown, but its still not the best place. Evan and I spent a bitter cold afternoon walking around downtown. I was interested in the little mod boutiques of furniture, housewares, and jewelry that were dotted around downtown.
The entire time we were out, I didn't see another tourist, shopper, or stroller. It was weird. You had either business man or bum. There were enough shady people around to send me back to the hotel. There was a park that looked decent, and there were kids playing in a playground. As I approched, one of the ladies there told me it was a private playground, and that we could go play at the playground across the park (just behind the groups of bums laying around). yeah right, woman. Poor Evan started crying and pointing as we walked away from the private playground, but I wasn't about to take him to the other side of the park! I made it up to him by letting him run wild and feeding him popcorn in the Renassiance Hotel lobby. Hehehe I'm glad the hotel staff was understandable.
I should have done more homework, and found the zoo and museums just outside of the city to go to. We did have one highlight of our trip. Mark wasn't too excited to go to the City Museum, but I kept insisting that we should go and the $12 entrance fee would be worth it. I was right.
It was so much fun. Its a warehouse that an artist turned into a kind of amusement park for art. Outside was a HUGE jungle gym of welded scrap steel, found objects, a fire truck, a castle tower, log cabin, tree house, two ball pits, and 2 fighter jets. Its was the craziest maze of twisted metal, slides, ramps, and ladders, that went as high as 4 stories high! Its a bit daunting at first. You wonder if you could really squeeze through some of the tight crawl spaces, but once you get going, you can't stop! You never know where a slide will take you. From the top of one side to the bottom of another, there's no easy way of getting from one place to another. Most of what you're climbing/walking on is thin and you can see clearly how high up you really are.
I am scared of heights. Just seeing someone up high gives me butterflies. I had to force myself to not look down. Evan is a very cautious kid actually. He doesn't take a physical risk at anything untill he's sure he can safely reach. So, taking him on this giant jungle gym was a bit scary at first for him. But in no time he was excited to crawl and climb around with us! If he was unsure about something, he'd look to one of us first to see if it was safe or get help before going on it.
The contruction was pretty safe. It looks like it wouldn't be, but you could see that for the most part you couldn't fall through anything. But if you climbed out of bounds you could get hurt. Mark really enjoyed himself. He was daring enough to climb to the highest parts. At the highest points was an old fighter jet and metal tower and the only thing connecting the two was a 30 ft metal coil (like a slinky) wrapped in wire mesh big enough for Mark to crawl through. It was too scary for me.
Another part of the warehouse had an underwater theme. It was wall to wall to ceiling mosaic tile, glass, and found objects. It was so pretty! Here you could crawl in and out of the "reef" and driftwood into rooms and slides. There were crawlspaces that looked like only kids could fit through, but an adult could fit through if they tried. I liked the white "sea kelp" forest in the ceiling that had a maze of tubes that you could see down from, but people on the ground couldn't see up into.
There was also a skateless skate park, a glass blowing section, an art room for all ages, a toddler play area, a daily circus of clowns and acrobats, an oddities section, model trains area, an aquarium, a 3 story slide, and so much more! I was really amazed at the mix of all the stuff in there. And everything is touchable. Evan had so much fun trying on old hats on a shelves and drawing on a giant chalk wall with buckets full of colorful chalk. There were old pianos for anyone to play or bang on.
We really enjoyed the City Museum, and if you ever happen to find yourself in St. Louis, go there!

We met up with our friend Hillary, who's going to school out there. How do we know her? She's a sister of our good friends out here in DC, and just loved joining in on their family fun. Hillary took us out to this cute little area outside of campus, full of unique little hip stores, and resturants. I wished Evan wasn't so tired and grouchy when we met up for dinner. He was so wasted from climbing around at the City Museum. It was so great catching up with Hillary, and hearing of their family's crazy happenings. I should have called her up earlier on our trip to get more info on things to do!

We went to the famous St. Louis arch. Mark didn't believe me when I said that we could go to the top of it. I didn't know how, but I knew that there was a way up there. When you get to the arch, it looks like a huge metal arch stuck in a massive lawn, and nothing around it. So, I started to doubt that there was anything else there than to just look at and take pictures of this metal monolith. We walked right up to the thing and saw that there was a walk way down into the ground from the base of the arch. There's a whole museum underground! You'd never know it was there cause there's no signs and the lawn is perfectly smooth over it. They have a kind of elevator that takes you to the top of the arch. There's 8 pods that hold 5 people each that are linked together like a chain that take you up and down the narrow structure. The higher up you get the more the arch curves to one side, and the more the pod will shift degrees to compensate for the change in angles, so that the riders inside aren't on their sides when the doors open. It looks so closterphobic at first, cause you kind of crouch down to get through the door into the pod. Then you sit in one of five seats listening to the voice on the PA system tell you it's about a 4 min ride to the top. It's one crazy elevator, but the view from the top is amazing. It happened to be a very clear day and just after sunset when we were there. At the highest point you're 630 feet high. It was pretty cool. I'd chalk it up there with the experience of going to the top of Taiwan 101. :)

Thats it for now... I've actually been typing this up for a week now. I haven't had the same motiviation to update the blog. I guess I've been distracted.
I'll post about the home improvement projects I've been working on soon. Oh, and pics from St. Louis are in order.