Yes, I'm still alive. I've just been on the road for the past two and a half weeks, wandering out west and back again. Without my laptop. Hence the non-blogging. (Yes, I know I can blog on my phone. But it's kind of a pain for posts of any length or with lots of photos.) But I'm back again and ready to chronicle our travels.
But first I have to weed the garden. And clean the house. And get the kids all ready for school. And get my body back on to Eastern time. And do laundry. And cook - man, cooking is so rough after you've been wined and dined for so long! And stop my kids from killing each other. Oh, and figure out what's going on with my eyes. I woke up this morning and my eyelids were swollen!
I know, what the what (?!?), right? Allegra, hydrocortisone, and ibuprofen, and they're still swollen and itchy. It's weird.
However, time to ignore all that and do a little blogging!
I had every intention of documenting all aspects of our roadtrip. This is the single picture I got - the mileage marker I hung in our car. For every 100 miles we drove we'd move the minivan to give the kids an idea of how far we went and how far we had to go. As you can see it wasn't too far to St. Louis - we got there in about 4 hours.
Our first stop was at the City Museum. How to even describe the City Museum? The owners took an old shoe factory and turned it into a giant playground for all ages. Lots of metal and art and funky stuff. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting a hipster. (Not that I recommend hitting hipsters with rocks.)
We paid extra to go on the roof, and that's where we went first since it was a hot day and only getting hotter. We walked through an old school bus that perched over the edge of a corner. The kids were muy impressed.
The view from the bus door that you could open and close.
(I had to borrow a bunch of images from the interwebs, because who has time to document EVERYTHING as it's going on?)
There were places to climb and places to slide all over the place. The kids LOVED IT. It really was for for everyone. Some of the things were a bit too much for Miss Tess, so Lance and I would take turns hanging out with her while doing crazy things with the boys.
As you can see, a climber's paradise. And just so... random!
Tess was too afraid to climb this thing, although I think she climbed up scarier stuff later on.
There's my boys! I think Cole would move to this museum if that were an option.
This is Josh climbing up the side of a big dome - almost like a giant silo. Cole and Lance soon followed; Spencer, who is a bit afraid of heights, opted out of this one. We waited by the fans and played on these weird spinny chairs.
It's hard to show just how high up they were!
There's Josh, chillin' at the top of this 100+ foot drop, like it's nothing!
Tess really liked sitting in front of the industrial fans. And who can blame her? It was getting HOT and (even worse) HUMID.
Tess and I were literally sitting in a cage over a several story drop. Nothing but the cage holding us up! (Spencer was a little too nervous to sit on the cage!)
Then we decided to go down the 5 story slide.
It was very twisty. And metally. I got really, really dirty over the course of the day. (To the point that I threw away the shirt I wore that day. It got so stained and gross! Don't wear light-colored shirts to the City Museum!)
We got to the basement and discovered a whole series of man-made caves and tunnels and whatnots. Tess was especially enamored with the color changing quartz.
At some point the kids all ducked into some really dark, narrow tunnel, and since we had no idea where it ended Lance and I had no choice but to follow. It got so small! And I got the first of some pretty impressive bruises. One on my arm lasted pretty much the entire 2 week trip; lovely.
There was all sorts of art and weird things like this all over the place. It was really such an odd, cool place! Really hard to explain unless you've been there.
Tess lurved the drawbridge that led to the "castle".
See up behind Josh? You could climb in metal tunnels up to that plane and all over the place - so high up!!
I'm not sure how it happened, but I took a backpack in but forgot to include any water or snacks. I know. ROOKIE MOM MISTAKE. So a couple of hours in and our kids were slowly melting down. If they didn't get something in them they wouldn't last another 20 minutes. We had to decide whether to leave earlier than planned, and thus kind of waste (in my opinion) the $100+ we spent on admission, or buy some expensive sodas to keep them going. We went for the extremely overpriced sodas and I found some DumDums in the backpack and after guzzling those down and resting for 20 minutes all was right with the world.
Tess was very impressed with my DumDum wrapper crane making skills.
On one floor the entire ceiling was covered with this white stuff - it was so cool.
Cole in the airplane. After this I climbed with the boys in this narrow tube so high in the air. Gah! It was the only time I just about said Nope and climbed down. But I didn't. I wish I could've taken a picture, but I didn't trust myself to get my camera out and not drop it.
We watched a one woman acrobat show for a bit. Josh pouted and complained for a good 10 minutes before it started, and then enjoyed it and demanded to be the one to give her a few bucks at the end. (Apparently she doesn't get paid by the museum, so lives off of donations. Odd.)
We wandered more. Climbed, slid, bruised, etc. And sat in electric chairs.
And looked at bug collections.
The last part we stopped at was like a roller rink, only no wheels, just kids running around. I love this picture of Tess sliding down on her belly!
They all had great fun - until they got hurt. And everyone got hurt. But everyone also walked out on their own, so WIN.
We were all hot and sweaty and gross by the time we were done. It was totally worth it. If you ever go to St. Louis I completely recommend checking out the City Museum. My kids talked about it the entire trip.
We decided to use VRBO again for this trip - so much cheaper to rent a little house rather than stay in a couple of hotel rooms! Here's the house we stayed in. (I tried to download some pics from the web, but it wouldn't let me. Dang.)
That night we decided to go to Fitz's Rootbeer, a restaurant that also happens to bottle it's own soda. We had to wait outside for a good hour, but we filled that time with playing Pokemon Go (because I am a cool mom) and telling the kids to quit picking on each other. We were just about to give up hope of ever getting a table when we finally got it. We had burgers and soda and it was DELICIOUS. (Although this might partially be due to the fact that we were starving. Whatever, it was good.)
And seeing the soda being bottled was pretty cool!
That evening we were very grateful for the solid air conditioning in our little rented house - it was SO HOT. The entire Midwest was experiencing a major heat wave, and of course we were vacationing along the Mississippi right in the middle of it.
Okay, so here are some more pictures I stole from the internet. Blogger won't let me move them, so whatever Blogger. I'm just gonna keep them here. I wanted them here in the first place. Gah.
So cool.
It's hard to show in pictures just how cool. Also, how crowded. Because it was.
Here's the tube where I about turned back. But I didn't. Because I'm a cool mom. Also, there were kids behind me. I didn't need that crawl of shame.
Of COURSE it had a dragon slide. TROGDOR!
It was a great first day to our trip!
