Jul
06
2009

St. Louis Gateway Arch

(Add / View Comments) (0)Monday, July 6, 2009 - 11:02:55 pm
(Posted Under: Travel, Livin' In The USA Livin' In The USA)
Today we drove from Union to St. Louis with a day planned for visiting the Gateway Arch and Botanical Gardens. Sadly our trip was delayed from Katie getting one of her blinding headaches (<singing>her retina's are scared</singing>).

We made it to St. Louis by around two, and due to some problems with Buller, we ended up in East St. Louis (in Illinois), which was clearly the bad side of town. Ahhh, it brought back memories of Detroit. [wink] In anycase, we finally made it back to the Arch. It's impossible to miss, but getting the right roads to get there...

Surprisingly Katie has never been inside, despite having lived in St. Louis, and it was a disappointment that she didn't feel well enough to go to the top of "the Effiel Circle" (as she called in as a child when she first saw it). I however did. The 'tram' to the top was not what I'd expected. A very Star Trek looking pod that sat 6 people - uncomfortably. [wink]

The view from the top was kinda cool, and it was certainly a different type of high observation deck - immediately feeling that you were on the arch when you got to the top of the stars from the pod tram. It was kind of a clusterfuck up there, definitely a much more confined space of a viewing platform than say Melbourne's Rialto, or Sydney's Skytower. A cool experience being up there, but I think the view of the tower from the outside was actually cooler.

We got some really cool photos from the outside, before driving back to Fenton to watch Meg & Andrew's swim meet. We did get somewhat twisted around on the way out and ended up going somewhat through the downtown area. St. Louis definitely seemed like the largest downtown I've been through. Clearly I've been to larger cities (Chicago and Detroit are two recent examples), but have moreso driven around them. In anycase, it's was definitely an interesting contrast to Phoenix, which has a much larger city (ranked 6th largest according to Wikipedia, St. Louis does not rank), but whose downtownw is nothing compared to St. Louis.

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