St. Louis

430 miles

We actually made it all the way to St. Louis last night. We were all feeling good, and the weather was good, so we decided to go ahead to St. Louis. This will allow us to do a little sight-seeing before jumping back on the interstate.

Eva Jo was able to find an RV Park near the downtown area (and near the Gateway Arch). One minor glitch... it seems that the Shriners are having their national convention this week in St. Louis. Boy do those guys know how to stop-up traffic! I was admiring all the tricked-out cars and their antique tractors though.

I added a data plan to my cell phone that was going to give us internet access on our laptop on the road (basically uses the cell phone as a GPRS modem). It's better than nothing, but just barely. We'll probably rely on WiFi connections at the campgrounds and use the GPRS connection only if we have to.

Speaking of WiFi at campgrounds, we're finding it to be hit-and-miss. Even if a campground advertises WiFi, it doesn't mean that it will work. We'll do our best to keep the blog updated, but it may be several days between postings because we haven't had a good internet connection.

We can't blog about St. Louis with posting the obligatory photos of the Gateway Arch. I should pass along to you all the interesting history, facts and figures about the arch, but honestly I wasn't paying attention when they were going over that. I just wanted to get on top of that thing!





Kendall put on his usual "Dad, do I have to go up there?" routine. Of course, once we got him up there he wanted to know if he could bungee jump off the top! "No son, we just got our new insurance and we'd like to keep it!"

The Mississippi River is up quite high, and the water is moving fast with lots of debris in it. You can tell they're had a lot of rain.