Day 4

Since we didn't get to bed until 3:30 in the morning we had another pretty leisurely departure today. We had not intended to stay up that late, but we didn't arrive at Paul's house (who we found through couchsurfing.com) until after 10 the night before. Shortly after we arrived we left to meet his friends at a nearby bar and stayed until it closed at 1:30. Returning home, Paul and his roommate Adam began a marathon of Mike Tyson's Boxing on the original Nintendo and Caitlin and Joe turned to updating the blog. Paul warned us that the Nintendo marathon could continue indefinitely and that if we got tired that we would have to let them know. Finally, at 3am Joe pulled the bedtime card and Adam and Paul gladly obliged.

Our first stop once we left the house was breakfast at a Bike repair/Coffe/Breakfast shop called Velocity. We ended up with the wrong order, but when Joe turned to ask the table behind him if we'd received their food, he found that they were already nearly done. It turned out that Caitlin and the girl at the other table had ordered the same thing, and Joe and the guy had ordered the same thing but in different forms (burrito vs. panini) so the orders had been mixed up. Jokingly, the guy tried to convince Joe to hand over the sandwich he had ordered, but clearly that wasn't going to happen.

The next stop, and the main event of our day was the City Museum of St. Louis. It is difficult to explain, but essentially it is a giant 4 story playground in an old warehouse building in downtown St. Louis. The picture on their homepage shows what it looks like from one corner on the second floor, but what you cannot see are the endless tunnels, crawl spaces, chutes, caves, and holes that blend together into a giant maze like structure.

Here are a few pictures!

Looking down a giant 3 story slide


Joe climbing out of an impossibly small tree trunk


Caitlin emerging from the same tree trunk


A catwalk constructed of roller pin things, where Joe lost his wallet and Caitlin FOUND IT!


Caitlin crawling down a tiny cave-hole-thing and looking back


Joe in a ball pit that Caitlin refused to enter, citing the sign that said '6 and under' and the disgusting kid snot-spit-whatever that was sure to be covering the entire thing.


A giant whale that whose mouth you could crawl into, anatomically correct and all. (If you click the picture you can barely see Joe exiting from the rear of the creature.)


Caitlin somewhere in the middle of all the fun


And lastly, some strange turtles that managed to arrange themselves in a toppled domino manner.



We're now in a hotel Tulsa, OK, wondering what (if anything!?) we'll be able to entertain ourselves with in the morning before we hit the road again. The drive from St. Louis was wildly uneventful, with nothing more than massive billboards simply displaying the name JESUS...



.. and a might perty sunset over Oklahoma.



We also drove under what is supposedly the largest McDonalds in the world, which spans across I-40 somewhere in northwest Oklahoma. We didn't get a picture because it was too dark, but in case you're curious here you go. Needless to say we were pretty excited.. but so much as to merit a stop.

That's it for tonight. Tomorrow we're on the road for as far as we can get. With exciting places like Oklahoma City and Amarillo, TX ahead of us, we can't wait to discover what's in store.