Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Day 22: Resting in St Louis

While they were at work, Emily's parents were kind enough to loan us a car and provide us with all sorts of information on places we could visit in St Louis. We decided to head to Forest Park, where we could visit the Zoo and the St Louis Art Museum (they call it SLAM, which is pretty awesome). Somewhere on the way, we passed a St Louis Bread Company, which is what Panera is called down there.

We easily found parking and decided to hike through the old World's Fair grounds to SLAM. One the way we encountered large groups of kids on bikes.

We had to stop and see what sort of awesome camp this was. It was a triathlon camp! While walking the paths, we even got to watch a group of kids practice their cornering on a bridge. The instructors didn't seem very impressed with our story though.

SLAM looks pretty impressive. It's one of the few remaining World's Fair buildings.

Art isn't really my thing, so for further details check out Jillian's entry (Which I'm hoping has more details). After eating at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant for lunch (it was the only option and very overpriced), we went to the zoo. Both SLAM and the Zoo were free, thanks to a special St Louis tax that I've fallen in love with. We didn't get to see the entire Zoo, since it was hot and we were already tired, but we did snap this gem of a photo:

We also went to the bear exhibit. It was the saddest thing we'd seen the entire trip. The black bear simply sat in his water hole and stared at the people with eyes so dull they could have been fake.

The brown bear was even worse. One of the bears paced fifty feet back and forth across his pen. Animals that big should have large forests to play in, not small concrete pens with chained down logs.

We also made a stop at the penguin exhibit. The penguins were much happier, as were we, since it was cold in the exhibit.

Deciding we'd had enough of the zoo, we moved on to Fitz's and Big Shark bike shop. Big Shark was kind enough to sell us the headset wrench we needed for our constantly loosening headset, but didn't have many tips for Jillian's constant foot problems. Fitz's was more fun, with good food and in house brewed root beer. The creme sodas were fantastic. Naturally, we got root beer floats.

Then it was time to head back. Last night we'd spent some time talking about the Katy trail. The official Transamerica route crosses the Mississippi some thirty or forty miles south of St Louis, so our plan was to ride down the river, meet up with the route, and go west. Unfortunately, this would require crossing the Ozarks, in an area known to be full of loose dogs. The Katy trail runs across the center of the state, following an old railroad bed along the Missouri river. Today we decided to take the trail out to Clinton, MO before moving into Kansas and finding the route. I spent quite a bit of time using the computer, planning our route out of St Louis and on to the trail. Jillian got some blogging done (as well as laundry), though the cat got in the way.

Emily's parents watched us pack up our stuff in their living room as we got ready for an early start. Our goal was to be out of St Louis early enough that traffic wouldn't be able to bother us.

So, once again, we turned in for an early night. Although I didn't realize it at the time, we hadn't once spoken about not finishing. After our conversation in Indiana, we'd decided only to make it to St Louis. Now that we were here, neither one of us thought once of not making it to Colorado.

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