St. Louis

We drove until about 10pm the day we left Colorado.  We drove all the way across Colorado and Kansas!  We got into Missouri and decided to try to find a hotel - well bad news - they were all full!  There was a Royals game and something else going on and we couldn't find a room!  We finally found one and it was a little scary - but we got to sleep which was good!  The next morning we woke up and headed for St. Louis.  We wanted to stop and go up in the arch because we had heard from a few people how cool it was.  The arch is right off the interstate - we saw it right when we were getting into downtown St. Louis. 

We got to St. Louis about noon Sunday.  It was a 3 hour wait to go up in the arch - we decided we had come all this way - might as well wait!  We walked into downtown and had some lunch while we waited.  Then we walked around the outside of the arch for a little bit.  

Then it was our turn to go up in the arch.  It was really fun.  It took about 5 minutes to get to the top in this little box like container, and it was pretty small!

It was really cool to look out the little windows at the top of the arch.  It was much smaller than I thought, but it's a pretty narrow arch - so I don't know what I was expecting.  You kind of had to lean over the walls to look out the windows.

The Cardinals were playing a game as we looked out the windows.

 The Mississippi River flows right below the arch:

 Downtown St. Louis

 Bristol was pretty tired and starting too get a little grumpy - she wanted to eat and go to bed!  Unfortunately, there was no where to feed her!

 These were the windows - pretty small!

 The tram down took about 3 minutes.

We finally got back to the car about 4pm - we decided to drive and see where we made it to before getting tired.  We ended up driving the rest of the way home!  We got home at 4am Monday morning - we were TIRED!  The kids did so awesome on the trip - they were great!  I was so worried that Bristol would cry for hours at a time, but she never did - she was a perfect angel!  It took me a couple days to recover from that all night trip though.

I hope the older kids have fond memories of this trip for the rest of their lives.  I thoroughly enjoyed this trip - I loved that we got to drive so many miles across this beautiful country together and see so many beautiful sights.  I will remember this trip for a long time.  I hope we get to do another trip like this someday!  Thanks family for the amazing experience.  I love you guys all so much!