Vacation Post # 11

I realize that my blog has been seriously neglected as of late. I hope to remedy that.

I shall now resume the tales of Chris' and Chris' Great American Road Trip- August 22, 2007.

Our first stop was Taum Sauk, the highest point of Missouri.

This "high point" is another very flat one. It's in a state park and the path to the peak is paved. There is another hike in the area (part of the Ozark Trail) but it seemed a bit more strenuous than we were up for and we didn't have enough water with us.

After the high point we headed up to St. Louis to visit the McDonald's Monument. What, that's not what it's called? Sorry, the Gateway Arch. Huh, that's not the name either? Yeah- we were shocked to learn that it's really called the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

The engineering of this monument was amazing. We watched a film about it, and it just blew me away. And I was also impressed that in the 50s and 60s they had enough forethought to film the construction so that we could watch it. But can we talk about how un-safe it was? No one wore harnesses of any kind! We took a tram ride to the top of the monument. Again with the forethought to make it hollow and lay track so that people could do this! Granted that tram was pretty tiny, but it was worth it. Great views from the top. They also had diagrams showing what the buildings were and also noting what had been there when the monument was erected. Interesting to show the changes. We go to see where old Busch Stadium was, and where New Busch Stadium is today.

When we got back to the ground we walked around the park area for a little while as I wanted to try to get more pictures of the arch from other angles. And then we started thinking....

Hey, this isn't Fenway Park. New baseball stadiums are much larger. I wonder if we can get tickets to a game. So we called Chris dad to first find out if there was a home game that night, and then also to find out what the range in ticket prices was. There was a game, and the prices seemed decent, so off we headed to the ballpark. Score! Decent seats at a decent price. This wouldn't happen back in Boston!

We had originally hoped to get a few more moles driven after the arch, but since we went to the game we knew that wasn't going to happen. No big deal though. Instead, after the game, we crossed the river into Illinois and stopped at the first motel we came to. It was a late night, but we'd had fun, so it was worth it.