Oh spring break! I had been looking forward to this for a long time. I actually made a small geography unit for my class based off of my excitement to travel!

Here are my highlights:
Missouri Botanical Garden - I love botanical gardens. The Climatron was very nice. My favorite was the Mediterranean climate. The architecture and plants in there were just beautiful! We also wandered around the park for a while. It was a little too early to see much, but what we did see was great. The cherry trees were beautifully in bloom!

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial - This is also known as The Arch! I have been here a few times. But every time I come, I forget how big it really is! We were a little too early in the season to enjoy the park outside the arch. So we went right into the arch. We got there just before a few school groups arrived. Thank goodness! The pods to get us to the top are small, but not horrible. It's very fun to look over the city through the tiny windows up there. But that is all that you do up in the arch. After that we wandered the museum. Very interesting about the Lewis and Clark explorations of the west.

Tom Sawyer riverboat - By signing up for e-mails from the Arch, we received a coupon for a free ride on the riverboat. We had looked into the riverboats during our planning, but it was just too much money for just an hour. So this free ride was just right! It turned out to be a perfect day to ride on the boat. The morning was a little overcast, but by the time we got on the boat in the early afternoon the sun was brightly shining! We rode on the boat "Tom Sawyer". Actually the ride itself was pretty cheesy. There really isn't too much on the east side of the river. The west side has the St. Louis cityline. But I still enjoyed myself by soaking in the much needed sun!

Forest Park - We were here about one week too early. We really wanted to bike around this huge park. But there was no bike rental place to be found. I think we ended up walking most of the park anyway. The World's Fair Pavilion was pretty neat. I wonder what it would have been like during the original World's Fair. My favorite part of the park was Turtle Park. It was a super cute park with a bunch of HUGE cement turtle statues. Hannah and I had a ton of fun crawling around and on the turtles. A grandma with her two grand daughters came to eat supper on the turtles as well. It was a perfect picnic spot, sitting on the head of a turtle. Thankfully, the turtles made up for the lack of biking fun at this park.

City Museum - I'm not sure what to think of this place yet. It was pretty much a huge play place that both kids and adults could enjoy. It was filled with recycled things and built into lots of tunnels, nooks, and crannies to fit through. Actually I couldn't fit through much. I did go down the 10 story curlicue slide. Once I got off I felt old because I was pretty dizzy. My knees totally showed the abuse the next day. We had fun for almost 2 hours, but then we were done. We could have returned later that night, the place was open until 1am! I still don't know what to think.

Brewery tours - We visited 2 breweries while we were in St. Louis- Budweiser and Schlafly. Budweiser was nice. It was a well run tour for the amount of people that go through the tour. At the end we got to taste 2 of the beers. It was a nice tour. But then there was Schlafly. We almost didn't make a tour for this one. We didn't have an exact address for this, the locals that we asked didn't give us great directions, and our GPS couldn't find it. But thankfully when we made a super short walk through of Union Station, I picked up a St. Louis tour guide. This gave us the exact address we needed. Our tour group consisted of 5 people and one guide. What a great tour. We actually walked through the entire back part of the brewery. Then we got some small tastes of a bunch of their beers. What a great tour!

Food - We stopped at 2 local restaurants that were phenomenal! I always love great food while on vacation. My trip to Italy really spoiled me on that one. But these 2 restaurants were fantastic. The first one was Bailey's Chocolate Bar. I had their Signature Chocolate Martini. It pretty much was a double chocolate milkshake, with vodka! AWESOME! Hannah had a mint chocolate martini. It was decadent and refreshing all at the same time. Then we had a cheese sampling platter. SOOOO good. That night could have been lasted much longer. We just sat there enjoying the wonderfulness of the Bailey's Chocolate Bar! The second great place was Blues City Deli. This was a suggestion from the people at City Museum. You knew this place was great when it was stuffed full of locals. The sandwiches were huge and so tasty. I loved the tiny hole in a wall atmosphere with the super yummy food!