Easter Weekend: St. Louis Edition
warning: Photo Overload! Remember you can click on the photos to view them bigger.
We had CRAZY FUN Easter weekend!
We headed South to visit our friends- Jason, Christina & Claire in St. Louis.
What a treat!
Spring is full gear there....flowers are blooming, trees are leafing out....and you can definitely smell Spring in the air. Now that's a smell I'd love to have for my soaps!
St. Louis has tons to offer visitors....
for starters how about The Magic House?
The Magic House is a children's museum. It's the largest, most complex children's museum I've ever been in. There was just so much to see and do!
The Children's Village was an entire community complete with shops and businesses- all the things that make up a town. They had a pretend library, grocery store, restaurant, doctor's office and lots more "buildings". All hands on. All super fun!
The girls pretending to be at the bank. Annika is the bank teller and Ava is pretending to be a bank customer:
The Children's Village was an entire community complete with shops and businesses- all the things that make up a town. They had a pretend library, grocery store, restaurant, doctor's office and lots more "buildings". All hands on. All super fun!
The girls pretending to be at the bank. Annika is the bank teller and Ava is pretending to be a bank customer:
They had a wing devoted to all things science. Here's a hands-on experiment using all things magnetic. Ava is trying to see if she can make a long chain of paperclips.
Annika trying to make a long chain of nuts using their magnetic properties. She'd get it to a certain length and then the chain would come crashing down (perhaps the chain of nuts were too heavy?).
We also visited an exhibit where we got to be Detectives. There were hidden doors, secret duct-work to crawl through, hidden messages to discover, mysteries to solve and fingerprints to analyze. They also had kid-sized lab coats and pretend glasses for the little scientists who were analyzing the clues could wear. I LOVED this exhibit!
This was in the Modern Art room (photo below).
Here the girls are creating Art using a touch screen monitor. Honestly, I never got the hang of using this screen. You were supposed to "paint" using your fingers by choosing from the colors available and then "painting" with it on the screen. You could also "spin" the artwork on the monitor to create different artist effects. Do you see the screen behind Annika with colorful rectangles? That was an interactive piece of artwork. You could touch the screen (touching a rectangle, for example) and the object would either change color or shape or both.
I think we could have stayed here for a week! This place gets 5 out of 5 stars from me! It was pretty darn crowded as it was Easter break and raining....but even so it was still lots of fun.
After lunch and after recovering from our morning at the children's museum we headed out on a beautiful walk on the Katy Trail. St. Louis is at least a good month ahead of our neck of the woods (SW WI). The wild phlox was blooming. The mayapples were showing their leafy umbrellas. The earth smelled like it had just awoken from a deep winter's sleep. The trees were leafed out. The girls even found some garter snakes to observe. It felt so good to go for a walk in the warm sunshine. The Katy Trail is apparently an old railroad line that was recycled into a walking and biking trail. Christina said it was 200 miles long. That trail would be PERFECT for a bike ride! I forgot the camera! Oops! After a 4 mile walk we naturally all felt we deserved a treat...ice cream from Oberweis Dairy. Oh boy...Braum's - you'd better watch out!
Friday night was exciting as well....Nasty looking clouds & weather...turning into some rocking storms....with tornado sirens blasting. Hmm... Tornadoes scare the living daylights out of me! The guys were naturally watching the nasty weather OUTSIDE on the driveway. Uh....I think being inside is much safer- thank-you-very-much! Thankfully the tornado was well to the north of us. And more importantly, thankfully there were no fatalities from the tornado. (yes we saw the damage ...Oh mY! I'm sure you've read about it in the news and seen the photos of the destruction the tornado caused.)
On Saturday we checked out the
I think we were in love with this place from the second we entered the building.....
A gigantic, huge, enormous and complicated ball run that took up the entire ceiling space of the museum's foyer....
which mesmerized the girls!
First stop at the SLSC: The Discovery Room. Much like the Magic House in miniature form. Lots of hands-on activities for the kids. The girls played non-stop for nearly an hour.
We also saw Tornado Alley in the IMAX theater...how very appropriate considering that a tornado had devastated a part of St. Louis the previous night! I'd never been to an IMAX theater before...it was definitely a different way to experience movies (and get a senses over-load)
We'd heard about Crown Candy from a friend .... it's an old-time Malt & Shake & Candy Shop in St. Louis.
The malts were yummy! And HUGE! They have a deal going that if you can drive FIVE of their malts in 30 minutes they're free. Oof. I couldn't even drink ONE in thirty minutes! Forget drinking five of them! I tried a banana malt that had pecans and nutmeg in it. Oh. So. Good.
Thanks to the Guys for going along with this...I've always wanted to go on a horse-drawn carriage ride. And we did. :-) The ride took us along the nearly flooding Mississippi River.
A Squished Claire!
Nice horsey! However kids, Mommy and horse jumped when a roll of thunder cracked overhead. Time to go!
Easter Morning
Apparently the Easter Bunny knew we were traveling. That Easter Bunny! He's so amazing!
I bet you know what this is:
(hint- it's a GINORMOUS arch towering over St. Louis)
Do you see those teeny, tiny dark rectangles in the center of the photo (on the Arch)?
Those are WINDOWS!
You can travel all the way to the top of the Arch! Via a funny egg-shaped pod (elevator). I know it's difficult to tell but those little rectangles with numbers on them (the one in the center has the number 4 on it) are actually the doors to the egg-shaped pods. Upon entry of this area one of the assistants working in the area assign you a particular pod number. You wait....and wait...and then those little doors open up, the people inside exit and then you finally cram yourself into the little pod.
See? Aren't those pods pretty darn small? Going up the elevator is almost like being on an amusement park ride...going higher and higher (you don't have a window to look outside though....that would have been nice).
The Arch is 630 feet tall and 630 feet wide. Ava was NOT comfortable looking out those tiny windows. I don't blame her! It made me kind of nervous too.
That's the Mississippi River down there. You can tell it's definitely flooding!
This is at the top of the Arch...not super big. You have to really stretch to get a good view out the windows.
I couldn't help myself...just had to take a pic of this beaver and more importantly of this sign :
("Only live animals can grow new hair." How true!)
After the trip up the Arch we toured through the museum (and of course the shops). My friend said that St. Louis is the only town that commemorates people leaving (the area). LOL!
And now everyone back in the car for a 6+ hour car trip back home!
Many Thanks to our wonderful hosts- Jason, Christina and Claire for such an exciting & fun weekend!
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