STL; Zoo; Fitz's; City Museum; White Castle

Friday, January 2nd:

We got up early-ish and loaded up both cars for a day trip to Saint Louis (STL). The boys rode with Maroua and me and Ella rode with Kris and Ryan. As hoped, Ella napped on the two hour drive.

Our first stop was the St. Louis Zoo. In STL, the zoo and many museums are free. We found parking and walked around. We really lucked out on the weather- it was in the 40s and 50s. The zoo was really nice, but there were several closed exhibits due to weather. The kids rode the carousel and saw huge grizzly bears, lions, and a new baby giraffe.

Now it was time for lunch. We drove to the beautiful old downtown for lunch at Fitz's Root Beer Company. The Fitz's root beer is pretty good, but a little too minty for my taste. Kris really liked it and Maroua feels as though it's not good by itself and needs ice cream. During lunch we discussed what to do next. Maroua had heard that The City Museum was really cool, but it cost money. It's $2 cheaper after 5 so we figured we'd go ahead and go and by the time we got there it would be 5 already.

The City Museum should be on the list of thing to do before you die, but probably should be before your body quits on you. When we arrived, we were amazed at the huge, iron structure on the outside. It was an intricate maze of rusted stairs, airplanes, a firetruck, and slides and it was probably five stories tall. We hurried in and immediately saw a three story slide that ended in the lobby. We each paid our $10 and walked in, marveling at everything. First up: the outside crazy playground. It took a while to figure out how to get out there, but once we did, it was amazing. Jacob's big goal was to get to the firetruck. We climbed stairs, went through tunnels, and finally got to the firetruck. We played there for a long time before heading to the ball pit. This was a chaotic, giant cage filed with kids throwing beach ball sized balls. Rami and Jacob had a hard time getting around, but liked the challenge. After a while, Rami got hit by a stray ball so we left. Jake wanted to go back to the firetruck and Maroua and Rami went around looking at more stuff. Maroua found us later and we went to the bottom of the playground where they had a fire pit and were letting people roast marshmallows. It was so surreal!

We regrouped and went to explore the inside of the museum. The kids rode a train and played in the toddler area while we adults rested up a bit. This place was crazy! There was a huge area just for arts and crafts, a skateless skate park, a big area devoted only to blocks, stone work from the tops of buildings, and more. And then we went on the craziest thing of all..

THE SUPER ULTRA MEGA COLLOSSAL SLIDE!!!!!!!!!

We climbed a million stairs (I carried Ella, so I got my workout for the day!) to get to the 7th story. We then took a slide all the way down to the first floor. It was nuts... It was a spiral and mostly enclosed, so it seemed like it took forever to go down and a lot of the time it was pitch black. So crazy... Once at the bottom, Ella and I had to sit for a while-- we were breathless and dizzy. After that, we went to other areas: the mangroves where you climb through trees and tunnels and the caves where the stalagtites and stalagmites look like dinosaurs. A lot of this would have been more fun if we were not fearing the deaths of our children the entire time. There were tunnels and slides everywhere so it would be really easy to get separated and never find each other again. (Kris looked up the death rate when we got home-- 0 dead, 2 very seriously injured. We were sure the whole place was a death trap...)

And then we saw a circus. Nuts, right? There were about 5 aerialist acts in a small circus arena. They were part of the museum's circus classes and performed for tips. The kids were getting very tired and hot so we stripped them down to only one layer of clothes.

Around 11:00 (the museum is open until 1AM) we went back to the car and headed back to Columbia. Kris requested that we find a White Castle on the way home, so Ryan led us to our very first White Castle experience. I say gross, Kris says good.