Maeve and Lilly

Spring Break 2009 for the girls turned into a road trip. We hit the road around 8:30am and were in St. Louis by 2pm. After dumping our stuff in the hotel room, we raced to the zoo for an hour and half before it closed at 5:00. The zoo’s reputation as one of the best-in the country is well-deserved. The five hippos swimming in a glass-sided enclosure were super-cool. Lilly liked the chimpanzees and Maeve, while disappointed that the rhinos and elephants were in already, liked the bears. After the zoo, we found one of the 100s of Imo’s Pizzas that litter the city. St. Louis-style pizza is described as an acquired taste. We, apparently, have not acquired it. The velveeta-taste of the cheese and the way it stuck to the roof of our mouths makes it likely that we will not ever acquire it. Lilly described it as “gah-ROSS!” Ted Drewes custard, however, was right on.

Unlike the warm sunny weather of the day before, the next day was rainy and cold. Didn’t matter though, because we went to the City Museum for the day. Housed in a former shoe factory, it’s part amusement park, part art exhibit, part discovery center, part zoo, part museum, and part spelunking expedition. Five floors of won der — I was indeed blown away as were the girls. I was almost impossible to drag them away from the underground caves constructed of concrete and wood. They were lured away be the prospect of art projects and we all made cutout snowflakes — monkey, dolphin, angel, and dragon. After lunch the weather had improved enough that Lilly and I could climb around the monstrous outdoor sculpture of girders, rebar, old construction equipment, and airplanes welded into a fantastic maze of ladders, tunnels, and slides. We finished up with the aquarium (where our fingers were nibbled by doctor fish and we petted sharks and stingrays) and a climb five stories up to top of the building and then a spiral slide all the way back down.

We finished up the day with dinner at Mama Campisi’s with much better pizza and an out-of-this-world wedge salad. After a quick dip in the hotel pool we turned in. OKC tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 2:51 pm and is a tidbit about Lilly, Maeve. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.