St. Louis

We headed to St.Louis, Missouri last Thursday to attend Mobilize USA, a conference for twenties. Yes, we know that we don't exactly fit into that age bracket anymore but since that is the group that we work with at church it was a great conference to go to. We went with Warren & Kim, the senior pastors of our church and Brent & Nancy. My friend Michelle lives in Wisconsin and drove the 5 hours to see me there. It's been 1 1/2 years since we saw each other last, which makes it 2 times in 10 years. We arrived in the city the day before the conference so we had time to run around the city to see some of the sights. We headed to the Arch first, the gateway to the west. I opted to not ride the "pod" up the 600 feet to the top (call me a chicken, I don't care). There was a great Lewis and Clark museum under ground there and it was fascinating to read their journal excerpts and see other historical things from that time. We headed from there to the old Courthouse building. Behind it was a great Italian place called Calico's which is a St. Louis icon as far as cuisine. We sampled the local specialty, toasted ravioli. Mmmmm...makes my mouth water just thinking about it. We walked from there to the Cardinals Stadium and while in the gift shop, ran into a fire crew. Turns out there was a fire station housed in a really old building just a few blocks away. After our station tour, we hopped back on the metro and headed to Forrest Park, a huge urban park in the center of town. It is 500 acres BIGGER then Central Park in New York. We walked from one side to the other passing the history museum, the pavilion from the 1940 World's Fair and the art museum. We ended at the St. Louis Zoo which is free to everyone and ranked in the top Zoo's in the nation. At first we thought it was great, the bear and penguin exhibits were amazing. Then we had some trouble. We would walk to an exhibit and then find a empty cage and a sign that said "See us in our winter home" but with no explanation as to how to find said winter home. After 20 minutes of wandering, we decided we were too cold and hungry to keep wandering. We ate that night at Pujols 5, some baseball guy named Pujol's restaurant. There was tons of memorabilia which was cool, but since I'm not really into baseball, it was kind of lost on me. I did enjoy my food though!!
The conference was amazing. I am so glad that I went and I am feeling very guilty now about all the whining I did leading up to this trip. St. Louis in January wasn't that bad. There really was lots of things to see. My girls survived and even had a good time without me. You may need to remind me next time that I said this!