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Saturday, July 14, 2007
Day one Bacon vacation July 2007
Saturday morning... had the oil changed in the truck, the rear-differential fluid changed and some carbon cleansing dealio done to the truck. I cleaned and re-oiled our air filter, then Jacob and I went at 11:00ish to pick up our Angel-Food ministries orders. Once we put all the food away we headed out of Dodge.
Listened to some Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire audio book on the way to St. Louis. Peaceful, uneventfuly trip most of the way to St. Louis - thanks to Jen's egg-sah-lent packing skills with snacks and drinks and pillows. We stopped for a bathroom break and to look at an Ocean Mist Saturn Outlook at a dealership. We didnt' like it as much as we thought we would. Kind of liked the chocolatey-colored one second to the Tri-Diamond White.
Drove into St. Louis and parked (for free after looking for awhile) down by the river and walked down towards the arch.
Saw two ladies and a young man pulling in a nice blue channel cat - unfortunately did not get a photo of that. Chatted with them for a few minutes, they were familiar with Evansville, primarily for Casino Aztar where they said they'd visited for gambling. We mentioned we were going to a church camp and they asked if it was like a revival. I told them about Lew and how he had been a missionary in Taiwan and a Soutern Baptist pastor and it was like family with people coming in from Florida, Indiana, Maine, Iowa, Arkansas... the lady said, "Sound like a good ole' fashioned revival to me!" It was neat talking to them. For some reason, being on vacation makes me chatty and interested in talking to "strangers" much more so than when "at home."
We walked a pretty decent distance down the riverfront to the steps going up to the arch. It was quite crowded and interesting for the kids to see how they check baggage and we had to go through metal detector and stuff.
Inside the arch national park we watched a cool movie on Alaska, walked around the arch museum and then went up into the arch.
Had a good time and headed back to the truck. The weather was great, not too hot - and walking through the trees near the arch area was slow and peaceful.
Once we got back to the truck we were in for a relatively stressful drive west on 64 towards the zoo (it was already around 6:45ish) looking for a hotel. Suffice it to say we did a frustrating bit of driving around, then back-tracking and finally made it to the Hampton right across 64 from the St. Louis zoo. Kids got to go swimming awhile... well, Jacob decided he wanted to dive, even after being told not to, and lost his swimming privileges after about 20 minutes - so he and Jenny went back to the room.
Jen got a chance to workout on the elliptical machine for about 30 minutes and it was like a shot-in-the-arm for her. It's amazing to me how she enjoys something that seems like torture to me!
Got the kids some lunch-meat, cheese, grapes, carrots from the cooler and settled into the hotel beds to watch some food network while I worked on this entry!
Probably go to the zoo tomorrow, unless we can find something that we get a good deal or discount on for staying at this Hampton.
7/14/2007 09:49:00 PM by Todd Bacon
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