City Museum

After my proposals to go camping over Spring Break were met with little interest, I floated the idea of a trip to St. Louis instead. The big draw for us is the City Museum, and it's been a couple of years since we last visited. Needless to say, the idea of going to St. Louis was met with a LOT of enthusiasm by everyone. Satchel specifically requested that we go on either a Friday or a Saturday so we could stay late. (They are open until 1am on weekends.) On our last trip, we did a morning visit, rested, and then went back at night. That seemed to be everyone's preference again.

We drove up Friday night and headed directly for the museum on Saturday morning. We were bummed to learn that the roof was only open during the Summer, but found plenty else to do.

After a trip down the big slide near the doorway, we headed out to the Monstrocity. We took turns playing follow the leader. However, Satchel & I skipped the following for some bits.

Jiro was pretty fearless, which should come as no surprise.



Warren is not one to be outdone.



Once we conquered the Monstrocity, we headed for the caves and the ten story slide. Jiro was actually apprehensive about this, but I think he mostly doesn't like climbing the ten flights of stairs. He's also not a fan of the dark caves that lead there. (In the summer, you can more easily access the top of the slide via the roof!) One trip down was all we could muster from the boys. They were most enthusiastic about the ball pit.



The balls are really fun to throw at people apparently. Warren and I grabbed a burger at the adjacent grill and watched as the boys engaged in some friendly ball pounding with strangers. After awhile we coaxed them out with hot dogs.

After lunch, they wanted to play on the Monstrocity some more. Warren and I were a bit worn out by it, so we decided to let them explore it on their own while we went up to the fourth floor "thrift store" called Bale Out to do some shopping.



We could see them out the window, and they were having a blast without us. We were having a pretty good time without them too!

Once we were done shopping we collected the monkeys and headed for the Everyday Circus. On our last visit we saw a fire eater, but this time they had the full troupe of kids. It was awesome.



After that we headed over to play in the whale, and the adjoining tunnels. I went under the floor for the first time. It's pretty crazy down there!



After four hours of non-stop action, I suggested that we take a little break. The monkeys were not ready to leave even though it was clear that they were tired. We did some low key activities like visiting the gift shop and the shoelace factory.



Then we checked out the newly expanded architectural remnant section. The monkeys quickly bored with that and headed over to an area filled with sponges. There they happily built sponge structures until we convinced them it was finally time to go.





We left for about five hours. We went swimming at the hotel, took a little rest, and then went out for dinner. By the time we made it back to the museum it was 9:30pm. I was pretty tired, but we'd promised, so in we went. All the monkeys really wanted to do was play in the ball pit. Warren and I sat above and watched as they totally held their own in the ball wars.




Once the ball pit got just too rowdy, we headed into the caves with our flashlights for a bit. By 11:30pm the museum was pretty much 95% teens and older and I was 95% spent, so we said our goodbyes to the greatest place on earth.