Highlights of the Saints – September 3, 2018

A beautiful day with sunshine and blue skies and we took advantage of the weather to explore St. Charles and St. Louis.  We arrived in St. Charles just in time to take a trolley ride to see and hear all about this quaint little portion of downtown St. Charles that was established in 1769 and is the oldest city on the Missouri. 

Main Street in St. Charles

Maybe this is why it was named the first capital of Missouri for the first six years of its statehood. The city was also the actual starting point of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Missouri River at St. Charles

Sitting very close to the river is the Lewis & Clark Boathouse and Museum dedicated to this amazing accomplishment that includes life-size replicas of the keel-boat taken to the Mandan villages in modern-day North Dakota and the two pirogues that continued on to present day Montana.  Considering all that we read and saw, it was just extraordinary that they made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back.  The expedition started in the spring of 1804 and it took them 20 months to get to the Pacific and 6 months to return to St. Charles.  After this length of time many people thought they had all perished and in fact, they had only lost one man from their group though the entire trip.

I remembered hearing about Sacagawea, the Shoshone girl, way back in the stone age when I was in history class, but I never remembered she was pregnant when she joined the expedition and that Clark actually helped deliver the baby.  I also never heard that having the woman and a baby really helped because a ‘war party’ would not have women or babies with them so they were never seen as a threat to the Native Americans they encountered.

The rest of the town is filled with restaurants, shops and history that was fun to imagine.  There is a small patch of road that is maintained in the original wooden planks that was used back in the early days.  The balance of the road is still brick and I suspect maintained and replaced as needed as well.  Many of the buildings are still the original structures back from the early history of the town showing the wooden early structures, the later brick and finally limestone when the brick gave out.

There is a Missouri dessert I keep hearing about called Gooey Butter Cake and we found a Soda Shop in town that had some for me to try.  I don’t know if it was this particular version or not, but it was not my favorite.  However, we bought some cookies from Grandma’s Cookies that are maybe the best I’ve ever eaten.  I did find out they do ship so I may be in trouble.

We were really taken by St. Charles and stayed longer than we had planned, but now we  headed to St. Louis.  The main purpose of going into St. Louis was to be in the Gateway Arch at sunset to see if we could get some really great pictures. 

We were here back in 2006 and a lot has changed (or our memories are worse than we thought).  Now, there is a really detailed movie showing various stages of the construction that had me sitting on the edge of my seat.  The top of the Arch is 630 feet high which is taller than any other man-made monument in the country and to be built one level at a time on each side until it met at the top.  The foundations were dug 60 feet down to bedrock and then 25,980 tons of concrete poured below ground.  There is another 12,127 tons of concrete between the skins of steels up to the 300 feet.

Designing the tram to get people to the top was a challenge once the Arch was built that had to be overcome because of the unique shape.  They finally settled on 8 cylinders strung together that would stay upright in the various positions and I sure am glad they got that solved.  If you are claustrophobic at all; stay away from the Gateway Arch.  Its like sitting in a big round ball with  5 seats very close together.  One side has glass so you can see the concrete and cables on the inside of the arch.  I guess its supposed to give you confidence that this thing is not going to fall apart.  I have to admit, I had to start thinking ‘happy thoughts’ because my mind was taking me in some dark places.

The view of the city was beautiful and we did stay long enough to see the sunset.

Courthouse in St. Louis from the Arch

Pi

Cardinal’s stadium from the Arch

Sunset from the Arch