St. Louis

We were in St. Louis last week.

We had to go for medical reasons.

(Those of you who knew & prayed for us, thank you.)

We thought, "Hey, let's go camping and have a mini-vacation while we're there."

Great idea in theory.

We knew there was rain in the forecast.

It would literally change from one hour to the next.

So we got out the tent and prepped it for rain...

i.e. applying seam sealant and letting it dry in our living room.

Did you know we have a large cabin tent?

At 10' x 14' it takes up half of our living room.

When we finally got to St. Louis it had been raining for quite a while

and the forecast changed (again).

It was going to be cold and rainy for the entire week.

We stayed at the KOA on Route 66 who graciously let us upgrade to a cabin.

Praise God for an available cabin!

This Route 66 picture was taken when we were leaving...

and that's when the sun finally came out.

We were so thankful to be in this cabin.

It was very clean.

It had a full-size bed & a bunk bed for the boys.

We also had electricity and cable!

The weather was so crummy we only lit one fire.

It literally rained almost the entire time we were there.

On the morning that we left the low was 39 degrees!

We did manage a very cold trip to the zoo.

We pet stingrays.

They were a lot softer than I had thought they would be.

This is funny because Connor is not fond of bugs.

I thought this was an interesting item in the bug building.

Gee, I'm glad Connor's allergic to soy!

We keep telling everyone that soy is added to everything... even slugs!

We spent a lot of the time at the zoo finding indoor exhibits to see.

The butterfly place was one of the warmer ones.

Did I mention it was cold and drizzly?

This was the hippo exhibit.

I didn't get a good picture because it was so popular with

the 20 buses of kids from area schools.

This was the best hippo shot I got.

Which amazes me because of how many kids were crammed at this spot!

We wanted to see the elephants.

We walked for what seemed like forever in the cold drizzly weather.

We finally get to the right place and this is what we saw.

A mallard.

We finally found the elephants.

I'm wondering if they weren't so fond of the weather either.

But this one cooperated for a picture.

They weren't getting sprinkled on inside the cave.

This was another place we could go to get out of the rain.

For some reason this guy just swam down and laid his head on this rock.

He stayed there long enough to get two pictures.

Must have been tired, I guess.

We would like to go back to the zoo when the weather is nicer.

There were some cliff like rocks near the campground.

Again, this was taken on our way home.

The blue skies didn't show up until then!

We decided to stop at the arch on our way out of town.

You don't realize how large the arch is until you try to take a picture.

It's taller than the Seattle Space Needle.

It was sunny but very chilly and windy!

We opted to not ride to the top of the arch...

and we were OK with that!

We visited the Museum of Westward Expansion at the arch.