Day 41: St. Louis, MO

Shall I impress you with my knowledge of inverted weighted catenary arches? Sounds like a fancy thing, it’s not. A catenary arch is simply an arch made by a chain that is freely hanging from two suspended ends. Inverted, we’ll, you know that one, upside down. Weighted... that’s pretty easy too, thicker on the ends tapering in towards the middle. See, told ya it wasn’t that impressive! What is impressive is that this thing was built in the 60’s with a 1/64th of an inch engineering tolerance so that the two legs would meet at the top. The capsule that you ride in to get to the top is called s team actually, straight from the 60’s, feels space-age-y; it’s tiny and sways as it goes up the arch. The windows at the top are only 7” tall x 27” wide. There are 16 on each side. They look tiny from the ground, even tinier up close. Bigger windows would not withstand the massive amount of force necessary to keep the legs apart while inserting the keystone. But, despite the tiny size, on a clear day like today the view is incredible, you can see more nearly 30 miles. The best part??? Because you are standing at the top of an arch that also happens to be an inverted triangle st the top, when you look down, you can see straight down. It’s definitely wild! So yeah, the arch is super cool.

It’s a bit debatable as to whether or not it was a good decision to build it where it stands. To do so, they had to raze the entire historic waterfront district of St. Louis. The closest you come to a historic building is the St. Louis basilica, the oldest Roman Catholic Church in the States. A building has stood on that site continuously since the 1700s. The current church was built in the 1809s I think. Also, part of the old courthouse stands inside the impressive dome structure you see from the outside. This area is rich in history - westward expansion, civil war, etc. You just don’t see remaining signs of that history outside of museums.

We took the arch tour nice and early this morning. Smartly we bought tickets in afvance, otherwise we probably would have been out of luck for a ride to the top. We browsed the very interesting museum, the kids actually got one last junior ranger badge here. This park just became the 60th National Park in Feb., and the new museum and such just opened Zjuly 1. Previously it was a national historic site. After the arch we visited the beautiful old basilica, then the old courthouse. Finally we wandered over to city garden - a little park full of sculptures and fountains and such. All of this before lunch.

Our timing was a little off, after lunch we had some time to kill before our steamboat ride up the Mississippi. Not enough time for one of the museums in the area, so we wandered around the park by the arch for a bit. The sun was pretty hot, made for a toasty boat ride, but it was fun. Timing again was a little off after the boat ride. If museums weren’t closed, they closed within the hour. No time for that today. So more park exploring, cold drinks, just chilling outside in the beautiful weather. The high today was only about 85.

Found s great bbq spot for dinner... one of those “open until sold out” places. Like really good, fantastic St. Louis bbq. And tgat’s the day.

Brown Car got another zero mile day today. She deserved the rest as we’llbe Putting some pretty serious miles on her in the next couple of days. This was the last planned adventure. But, who knows what tomorrow will bring?