Vacation - Day 5 - City Museum, Metropolis & Home

Because of the meltdown on Friday, we ended up staying in St. Louis most of the day on Sunday. Our first stop for lunch was at Union Station (nice, but not a "must-see"), then we headed over to City Museum.

Words can not describe City Museum - it is honestly something I think people just have to experience. It is like nothing I have ever been to. We had several people tell us to go and I am so glad we did. Despite having "museum" in the name, there is really nothing "museum" about it. Garet commented that he couldn't believe a place like this existed in this day and age with people being so worried about safety. Instead of trying to explain it, let me just show you.

Our first stop was "The Roof". There was an old Ferris Wheel at the very top. This was the first time Garet had ever ridden a Ferris Wheel.

You could also go down a few large concrete slides...

...walk across the water....
...and get in an old bus that was suspended 13 stories over the ground below. This I did not like.
At this point we are thinking, "What in the world is downstairs?!?!". Well, I'll show you.

Outside, they had a large ball pit for children of all ages...
...and a massive maze of wire tunnels, slides and abandoned airplanes that were suspended through the air. Here are Levi & Garet climbing one such tunnel:
Inside there was a little train that took the kids through a tunnel of recycled materials...
...and an indoor skate park that you don't skate on. That door in the back led to a pitch-black maze that the kids and Garet went through.
This video is in the "skate park" room. The video doesn't show just how steep that side was that Levi was going down...it was probably 10 feet straight down. Who comes up with this stuff?


I want to insert here that if you preferred not to take the stairs inside, there were slides from floor to floor. I really wish I would have gotten a picture of this, but I never did.

Garet and Levi had a great time on the outside tunnels, but they really liked the bottom floor as well. It was called the "cave" area and I seriously don't know how people don't get lost in there. There were several entrances to the "caves" and here is just one example:You might be wondering what Kara and I were doing during all of this. I obviously could not crawl through a small tunnel and I wasn't about to let Kara loose or we would have lost her. So, we stuck with the preschool area (again, no picture) and hanging out in the less enclosed areas of the caves.
We ended up staying most of the day at this place. The ideal age for kids is probably elementary school age, but there was no shortage of things for all of us to do. Garet is still talking about it.

After all the excitement, we decided to go ahead and make the drive all the way home despite getting in late. The trip went amazingly smooth because the kids were so worn out that they slept a lot. We also got a new DVD set for the car that will let the kids watch their own shows, so Kara watched Dora about 500 times while Levi watched Transformers (the animated one :). I think that helped a lot.

On the way home, we drove right through Metropolis, IL. Garet came here a lot as a child and so we couldn't stop being tourists yet...
Levi refused a picture, but Kara sure wanted to be Superman:
What would I have done if we hadn't stopped :)??
Well, I think that will be the last of our travels for 2009. I'm so thankful that we got to go somewhere new this year. Garet and I have kept it up for 9 years now and I hope we never stop!