Monday 15 August 2016

St Louis

Day 8 was going to be one of our fuller days with the majority of it spent in St Louis before a lengthy drive up into the state of Iowa. With regards to parks we'd have one big theme park, the final Six Flags Park but the morning was going to be filled with sightseeing.

That is "Kindly Gepetto", a bronze sculpture made by Tom Otterness. It's located on the corner of the City Garden Park.


We started the day with a trip to THE landmark in the city, the arch which is a short walk from the city's baseball ground. We took advantage of the time of day to park in the car park across the street. The arch is the tallest arch in the world and tallest man-made structure in the western hemisphere.

The area is undergoing some reconstruction and investment to make the riverside area a lot more pedestrianised. 

The arch sits between the river and the state capitol building. It is advised to buy your ticket up the arch in advance as they work off a time slot model. We'd bought ours the night before aiming for one of the earliest slots of the day, but even with that we still had a bit of a wait before we got to enter the lift system properly.

These are the loading doors of which there are 8, each of which can carry 5 people. 

The pods look a little bit like a sci-fi toilet when the doors open. The lift system is a hybrid of big wheel and elevator technology that gets the car up one leg. The other side's elevator wasn't operational today.

At the top of the 630ft arch is a low ceiling observation platform from where you can view west over the city of St Louis and East across the Mississippi river into the state of Illinois.


The State Capitol building and city.

The Cardinal's stadium. I think there may have been a game planned for later in the day.


and the Mississippi river. We missed a trick for those that hadn't been to this part of the US. Had we driven across the river we could have ticked off another state.


Having descended there's a small museum and a large gift shop.

We made our way back out and met up with Christof who, not wanting to go up, didn't have much to do whilst he waited for us. In time I'm sure they'll have more to do around here once the reconstruction work has completed.


a couple of other buildings in the city which we passed on the way to the next location

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