Most people going on a vacation to St. Louis in the summer would include a trip to see the Cardinals play baseball. Before we had children, my wife and I decided to take a trip there. We decided to intentionally go on a week when the Cardinals were out of town. We felt this would reduce the size of the crowds anywhere that we wanted to go, especially downtown. The trip included a visit to the Missouri Botanical Gardens and the St. Louis Zoo. We were pleasantly surprised that the zoo has free admission. At the end of our zoo trip, we thought we had seen everything but realized that we had not seen the primate house. Fortunately, we went back and saw the most enjoyable part of the trip. The chimps were swinging from bar to bar in a circle in the large cage in the middle of the room. As the crowd cheered them, they continued to go faster and faster. We almost missed the whole reason to go to the zoo.
Our visit downtown included a trip the arch. The only thing noteworthy about this visit was that we ran into lifelong family friends as we were entering the building. This is the family that my parents played cards with every weekend. We also made hundreds of day trips with them. The youngest daughter of this family was my best friend growing up. We had no idea that they were on vacation. We didn’t expect to see anyone that we knew in St. Louis, much less this whole family.
We bought an Arch figurine to go in our printer’s drawer as a souvenir of the trip. This Arch tends to fall out of the drawer and has been stepped on a few times. Other trips to St. Louis would involve baseball games, amusement parks and kids. No other trinkets have been bought for our drawer.