Monday, September 3, 2012

St. Louis Weekend Trip

The first weekend of the school year, Kyle and I took a trip to St. Louis with my father-in-law, Gary.  We went down to Indianapolis right after school on Friday and spent the night at their house and left for St. Louis in the morning.  I'd never been to St. Louis before (not even Missouri!), so check that off the bucket list!  Here are some pictures from our time there:

Goodwill trip before we left to see if they had anything for Kelsey's apartment.  Here Kelsey has found her "Monday pants" (maternity) and has paired them with a butt-ugly Minnie Mouse turtleneck....

We've arrived!

Our room!  Notice how Kyle has already claimed a bed as soon as we walk in?

And by the time I move across to photograph the other side of the room, "Hey, what's on TV?"  And you can certainly tell where Gary's first stop was!

Pretty!

This is our hotel!
Okay, I have to take a picture break to tell you about our hotel experience.  I probably would have skipped it, but Gary continually told me it was "blog-worthy", so I suppose I'll include it.  We checked in to our hotel without a problem, got in, used the facilities, and put our stuff away quickly to prepare to leave for the Cards' game.  We leave the room, get in the elevator, and Gary realized he forgot our tickets (Gary does this sometimes).  So we take the elevator all the way down, then have to take it back up, only to not have our key work anymore.  *Sigh.  So we go back down the elevator to get it reprogrammed.  It turns out Kyle had stuck it on the magnetic clip of his wallet without even thinking, which erased the door code.  Of course!  Then we try to go back up the elevator, but the elevator bank we've been using is crowded.  So we slip into another bank, but it only goes to the tip-toppest floors (way above where we are).  Since they were so crowded, we rode the elevator all the way up, then took the stairs back down to our floor, when we FINALLY got into our room to get the tickets.  This process took about 30 minutes or so due to all the people in the hotel for a wedding weekend.  I sure wish Gary would just remember his tickets!  :)

Hotel next door.  See how they've painted on extra windows and stuff to make it look fancier?  That was pretty typical of many buildings.

Walking to the Old Courthouse.

Courthouse where Dred Scott filed a lawsuit to maintain his freedom, kicking off a chain of events that led to the Civil War.
The Scott Memorial

Beautiful!

Going up?  No elevators in the mid 1800s.


Courtroom where the Scotts were granted their freedom after being sold to a family friend.

On our way to see the Cardinals play!

View from the Park.

This picture only took about 20 tries to get since Gary couldn't figure out my camera.

View from the seats we paid for (mwahahaha).



At about the fifth inning, I think, we moved to the other side of the field because we could see a ton of empty seats a section below.  Here's the view from that angle.



And on our way out, we found some really nice seats on ground level.  Pretty sweet action!

Dinner at Joe Buck's Restaurant.  It was delish!

So after they made the Old Courthouse a museum, they had to build a new one.  This is it.  Woooooooow...

I love how pretty much anywhere we went we could see the Arch.  Made for some great pictures!

A couple of weird statues in a park near our hotel....






Since the Arch has a museum under it, we decided to go visit the museum at night so we could leave as early as possible on Sunday morning.  Here's the Arch at twilight.





I thought this was hilarious!

The museum was VERY GOOD about giving the Mormons their due in the Westward Expansion Department.

Would you rather ford the river or caulk the wagon and float it across?

This sign next to the model of the trams to take us to the top of the Arch.

Just before Gary snapped this picture, I exclaimed, "This is what we're going up in?  You've GOTTA be kidding!"

St. Louis nightlife.

Passing by the Old Courthouse on the way back to the hotel.

This is the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis.  I'm not really sure why we needed a picture of it, except seeing this led us to begin talking about Washington, D.C., which led us to discuss the Mint buildings, which led to Kyle and Gary recalling that they told Kelsey that the Mint buildings were candy factories, which led to us making fun of Kelsey.  Maybe you just had to be there?

View from the Arch on Sunday morning.  I love how you can see the morning shadow!



Can you imagine floating down that river on a raft?!  Neither can I.



Yes, Kyle took his camera and I took mine.  His photos are more high-quality and artsy (and of buildings and trees, etc.) while mine are low-quality, unoriginal, and include more people.  Guess whose make the blog, though!



Going down?

The wait to get to the trams.


Well, it was a fun trip!  In our short stay of a little under 24 hours, we got to go to the Old Courthouse and learn about some pre-Civil War history, see a Cards game, get some legit St. Louis BBQ, walk around a couple of parks, check out the Rams' stadium (just the outside...the scalpers were a little scary and pretty determined that they were going to sell us tickets to an exhibition game), visit the Westward Expansion museum, journey to the top of the Arch, check out some cool old Cathedrals (camera batteries were dead by that point, oops!), get lost in our own hotel, and buy a Christmas ornament to commemorate the whole trip, a must for any vacation Kyle and I take.

Bye, St. Louis!  You were great!