St. Louis and Hannibal, Missouri- Thursday, July 25, 2019

With the temperatures reaching up to around 90 degrees today, we discussed at breakfast how we could get ice for the cooler in the car.  The hotel ice machines had signs asking people not to use that ice to fill their coolers, but there was a full ice tray in our room's refrigerator.  The only question was how to get it to the car.  Julie came up with the idea of using dog poop baggies to carry it, so she did.  She wants us to note that they were unused dog poop baggies, though.

We then headed back to downtown St. Louis and made our way to the Gateway Arch.  We parked in the warehouses of the old colonial area of St. Louis, but a lot of them are re-purposed into classy areas.  The area around the Arch itself is one big park and garden area.  As we were making our way through one of the gardens, the sprinklers turned on.  We didn't get too wet, but the Park Service people who were working there laughed as they helped us through.  We were a little early so we sat in the shade of the Arch itself as we waited for it to open.

The trip up into the Arch is in a tiny little tram car, which is more like an amusement park ride than an elevator.  If you think about it, you can see how the car has to pivot as it goes up the Arch-- otherwise, you'd end up side-ways.  We knew it was a tight squeeze and that Julie's claustrophobia would kick in, so she wisely decided not to go up.  It's a little round area and there are five seats in each one.  Luckily, Emma and Scott had a car to themselves as they went up (and only had to share it with one other person on the way down).  There is no view out as you go up.  The only things that you see out the windows are the stairs and maintenance spaces inside the Arch.  When you get out of the tram, you go up a few stairs to the observation level, where the floor follows the shape of the arch.  At the top, the scenes are nice.  The windows and small but they have provided places to lean against as you peek out.  We saw into Busch Stadium (home of the Cardinals) and the rest of the buildings of St. Louis out one side, and across the Mississippi River to Illinois on the other side.  After Emma and Scott returned to the ground level, they found Julie in the gift shop and did some shopping too.  Scott bought a model of the Arch to go with his other souvenirs on his desk at school as well as a book about its construction.  

We then went through the Museum at the Gateway Arch, which is underneath the Arch itself and tells a lot about both Westward Expansion as a whole and St. Louis's role in that expansion.  The exhibits are very well done and engaging to go through.  Our biggest criticism of the plan is that if you want to follow the timeline of it, you have to bounce back and forth across the interior space instead of just going up one side and down the other.  The story starts with the Natives of the area, including the Mississippian people of Cahokia and the more recent Osage Nation.  The earliest French settlements are shown with both models and mock-ups of their unique homes and a "fly through" of colonial St. Louis, done digitally.  Jefferson's vision of Westward Expansion, with the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark have their place here, of course.  The effect of the Louisiana Purchase on the people living here in St. Louis is given particular attention.  As the flood of people headed west, many supplied themselves with goods in  St. Louis, and a detailed model of the bustling riverfront in the 1800s is featured.  The effects of the American idea of Manifest Destiny are shown in dramatic wall-sized animated maps, as well as personal accounts.  Scott made note of a few ideas here to use later with students.  Near the end of the exhibit area, Julie was intrigued by a presentation about the "Mythic West," and especially how Western movies have portrayed and shaped our ideas of the west.  John Wayne caught her attention but she and Emma watched the presentation until the end.

There is a 35-minute movie about the building of the Arch, but we don't recommend it.  The narration is so sleep-inducing that Emma and Julie both nodded off and Scott wasn't far behind.  Perhaps the movie would have been better at half the length and with an updated sound track.  After the movie, Julie and Emma were ready to leave the Arch area, but Scott managed to convince them to walk towards the river.  He wanted to see the statue of Lewis and Clark and their dog, Seaman, that we'd seen along the river.  It made sense, since we've seen them at Fort Mandan in North Dakota and Fort Clatsop in Astoria, Oregon.  This statue was of the Captains (and their dog) returning in 1806.  It was a long walk down to the river and back up again, so Scott went down on his own while Julie and Emma stayed at the top of the bank and rested.  It was getting hot.  Looking back at it, Scott regrets not going to visit the Old Courthouse, since he had forgotten about its significance in the Dred Scott case.  But Julie was ready to find something to eat, and that has to drive our decisions because of her "condition."  

We made it to the car and Julie wanted us to go to the St. Louis Aquarium at Union Station.  She had seen the sign for it as we drove by it on the expressway (though Scott had previously checked the St. Louis booklet we've got and thought it was odd that it wasn't listed there).  She had gone to the website for the aquarium and assured us that there was definitely a place to eat there.  We found Union Station, which is an old train station that is being re-purposed as a hotel.   We found parking behind it, where the trains used to arrive, and there are also some old passenger train cars back there.  There was a lot of construction going on, though, and after we walked in from the parking lot, we saw that the signs said that the aquarium was coming in December 2019.  If only we had noticed that there was something fishy about it before.  The heat was bearing down on us, so we went to the first restaurant we saw- a fancier seafood place, but we needed to get something by that point and the air conditioning was nice.  Scott and Emma ended up getting something that is known as a St. Louis dish- fried ravioli.  It is what it sounds like.

We had some decisions to make, but ultimately decided to leave St. Louis early and head towards Hannibal, which was about a two-hour drive away.  That would give both Julie and Emma a chance to rest, and would probably get us to town in time to take a ride on the riverboat, Mark Twain.  Scott listened to some more chapters of Tom Sawyer as he drove.  We found our hotel at about 2:45, checked in and left our stuff there, and then went down into Hannibal to find the dock.

Hannibal was the boyhood home of young Samuel Clemens, who would later be known to the world as Mark Twain.  His most famous books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are based on his early life and the people he knew in this town.  His pen name, Mark Twain, came from his days working on a Mississippi riverboat.  We'll see more about him tomorrow, but we planned on taking a riverboat on the Mississippi today.

The boat cruise started at about 4:00.  Julie and Emma found a niche in the second deck of the boat that had a table and its own windows, and they claimed it is their own.  They said it reminded them of a private nook where the rich people would sit.  Scott explored the ship a little more and sat outside in the shade of the second deck and watched the driftwood moving quickly by in the river's muddy current while we were waiting to get underway.  Julie eventually joined him out on the deck too, where there was shade and a cool breeze, but Emma enjoyed having some alone time in the nook and stayed there.  We were a little disappointed to see that the ship was not actually a paddle-wheeler like we rode in New Orleans, but was just made to look like one.  The trip was relatively short, only an hour long, and took us downstream from Hannibal a short ways before we turned around and headed back.  The captain narrated most of the way.  He told us about the barges that were going by us and the enormous amount of material that they were able to move.  The biggest load we saw was a set of 15 barges, 3 by 5, being pushed up river.  He also told us the famous story of how "Mark Twain" was a call indicating that the river was deep enough to be safe, and was chosen as a pseudonym when Sam Clemons was working on the river as a steamboat pilot.  The pilot also pointed out the islands that inspired "Jackson's Island" in the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

After the riverboat, we went to the Mark Twain Diner.  It had no real connection to Mark Twain, but we figured it was as good a place to eat as anywhere.  While we were waiting for food, Emma beat Dad in a game of checkers that was at the table, and we made plans to have dinner with Scott's friend Richard in Kansas City tomorrow.  We drove around the town a little bit, but it's pretty small and the interesting shops were already closed.  We tried to get to take a ghost tour, but the spots for the 7:00 tour were already filled.  We drove to the nearby "Mark Twain Cave", but we decided not to go in.  It was probably one of the caves that inspired "Injun Joe's Cave" in Tom Sawyer, but the woman selling tickets told us that it was just a series of narrow passageways- not a big cavern like some caves are.   Even though we had time to tour it, that was enough to convince us not go in.  Between Scott's dislike of caves and Julie's claustrophobia, we wouldn't have enjoyed it.  Instead we went up the steep road to "Lover's Leap," which we had seen from the riverboat.  The captain had told us about the legend of two Indians that the bluff was allegedly named for, but he also pointed out that there are many rocky overlooks along the Mississippi that are also called "Lover's Leap" with similar stories attached.  Even so, it was a place that we offered a nice view of the river and the town of Hannibal.  It was a nice way to end the day before going back to the hotel.