We set out on Friday, May 25, for Clarksville, TN, where we overnighted before wending our merry way to St. Louis, MO. After half an hour of driving around the St. Louis park where the zoo is housed, we finally found spots and walked the twenty minutes to the zoo. It was a very nice zoo (of course, I like zoos as a general rule). One of the most interesting parts of the zoo was the butterfly house, within the insectarium. When you walk into the butterfly house, you get a card with probably twenty or more butterfly species, and you get to self-identify the butterflies that are flitting all around you without any cages to hold them in. They fly everywhere, even landing on people (two landed on Daddy’s shoulder). But we couldn’t stay long in the butterfly house or even see the entire zoo–we had an appointment with the Gateway Arch in the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
We went to a movie at the Arch called “Monument to Dreams,” a documentary about the engineering and construction of the Arch. The design by Eero Saarinen (the architect) was very stable but also very innovative–and challenging to execute. After the movie, we got to experience Saarinen’s design firsthand as we rode the tram to the top of the Arch and looked out over St. Louis on one side of the Mississippi River, and “the West” (complete with riverboat casino) on the other side.
Overall, Missouri hasn’t been my favorite state ever, but the zoo and the Arch were worth stopping for. Right now, we’re in St. Joseph, MO, on the other side of the state, just north of Kansas City. Tomorrow, we start the trail in earnest, following the Oregon settlers and the forty-niner gold miners. We head for Rapid City, South Dakota, and from there, on to Wyoming on Wednesday. Our pace will be considerably quicker (we plan to cover 650 miles in one day) but the scenery, from what I hear, has changed little since prairie schooners plowed the high grasses under their wooden wheels.
See the gallery for pictures of the zoo and arch. For more detail, read my brother and sister-in-law’s blog.
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