Today we took a spin into St. Louis to give it a sniff. It is about a 20 minute drive from our current RV park in Arnold for locals who know their way around. Unfortunately, we are not locals so we ended up discovering many ways to not get to the Arch, down on the waterfront. We would think we were on the correct path and would encounter a temporarily closed exit or a closed street with no detour shown. We eventually gave up on the GPS and tried to get to the Arch by dead reckoning and received glimpses of the faraway city icon. Eventually, we got to within about 2 blocks but found no way to get closer and no place to park. We mutually decided to delay our view of the Arch until we had driven back across the Mississippi into Illinois.
Our aimless wanderings in downtown St. Louis did yield some benefits. We got to cruise the poorly maintained city streets and check out the fabulous architecture. Most of the older construction is masonry but there are a few steel buildings and some really artistic modern structures unlike others we have seen. We stopped in at the St. Louis Basilica, a truly impressive structure with fabulous stone structural components and mosaic interior finishes. It is too big to get a picture from the outside without resorting to aircraft.
From the basilica we headed toward St. Louis’s central park and on the way we passed a truly impressive array of palatial mansions that were built by old St. Louis’s robber barons using funds they fleeced from idiots, like me. According to Zillow, many of these shacks have interior areas exceeding 10,000 square feet.
Once we made it to the park, we drove over to take a look at the beautiful St. Louis Art Museum which is a big classical Roman building but with interior lighting and flush toilets. There is a big statue of St. Louis right in front. I am not real skookum on Catholic requirements about what it takes to be a saint. In St. Louis’s case, he was honored for being the king of France, probably by a full complement of quite compliant cardinals sharp enough to realize that not making Louis a saint would separate them from their heads in front of a crowd of rag-clad Frenchmen.
After leaving Louis in the mirror, we headed back downtown to check out something called the St. Louis City Museum. It is a unique collection of stuff both inside and out. It appears that a whole phalanx of welders got together to create a huge array of fantasy structures tying together regular items like school buses and jet aircraft. One school bus projects out from the corner of the roof of the 10 story structure, giving the brave an opportunity to look out the window and 100 feet to the ground. There is an enormous metal praying mantis up there, too. If it wasn’t 98 degrees today, we might have stopped in for a bit at this place, just for a better look.
We set up the GPS again to get to the Illinois side of the river for a view of the Arch unobscured by berms, rural electrification and impressive buildings. The GPS could not find a way to the other side of the Mississippi that was safe for our vehicle regardless of the amount of tampering and tomfoolery we used so we tried Google maps and eventually made it the 5 miles or so into Illinois. We did get a nice view of the Arch from a park in Illinois where we also discovered a series of rotten bridges, low bridges and tight turns that probably scared our Rand McNally wayfinding thingy.
On the way home, we did stop at a local Target store so we could replace our portable ice maker which gasped its last yesterday in the torrid temperatures. The new unit was on sale so we also got a new skillet to replace our current non-stick pan that stuff sticks to regularly. We also got a whole room stand fan because we met some folks in Pennsylvania who were using their similar fan to keep the insects at bay when sitting outside. We love the idea of sitting outside our traveling home but the bugs can be daunting, particularly here in the midwest where the variety of bugs is truly extraordinary. We are going to try to blow them away, once the temperatures get down in the tolerable range and we can go outside.
We took a few pictures in town. To see them, click the asterisk *