Day 8: St. Louis, MO to St. Louis, MO

We spent today in the St. Louis area.  My thought was to see sights that might be less crowded (or at least where you wouldn't have to fight crowds to see whatever interesting artifact there was to see).  Reasonable choices seemed to be Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site and the St. Louis Zoo.

So, we arrived at Cahokia around 9:30 AM.  We toured the museum awhile and watched the introductory movie.  Then we scouted around the mounds.  There was a lot of wildlife around.  We saw a turkey and a fawn suckling (! Deer are a common site in Minnesota, and everywhere I think, but I've never seen one suckling, and Zoë got a photo of it as well).  Then we went to see Monks Mound (the big mama on the lot).  The mound is 100' tall and was built by people carrying dirt a 60# basket at a time over the course of (I believe I heard) 300 years.  The scale of the project is impressive when you consider that all they had was manpower.  In the museum they indicate the mound was built strictly for religious reasons.  This didn't really make sense to any of us.  We thought that religion may have been used to motivate the people or may even have been a factor in the reasoning for the construction but more practical reasons, possibly for flood events or (for a structure so incredibly tall) possibly to watch over the booming town (20,000 inhabitants at its peak) or to keep a lookout for visitors or enemies (a defensive fence was also built around the town).  In any case, it is an impressive view from the top of the mound.  St. Louis is easily visible (even if hazy on a humid day like today).

Next we went to the St. Louis Zoo (stopping for sandwiches downtown St. Louis on the way there).  What a zoo!  And I'm not even talking about the Zoo.  I'm taking about all of the folks attending the zoo, Forest Park, the botanical garden and other nearby attractions.  We had parked near the botanical garden and attempted to take a peek inside but found it was shut down for a wedding.  So, we decided to drive to the zoo.  Bad idea.  The traffic is crazy, folks all looking for a place to park, and there is no parking available.  Eventually (20 minutes later) we managed to navigate back to the botanical garden and park right where we had been.  We then walked to the zoo, which was only a 20 minute walk, and much more relaxing than the drive, if a bit hot in the 90 degree heat with full sun.

The zoo was OK.  It was like a nicer version of Como Zoo in St. Paul.  Nowhere near as nice a zoo as the Minnesota Zoo or the San Diego Zoo.  It was hot so Beth and I toured a little less aggressively than Bailey and Zoë; we met up later.  One cool thing we did see: a mamma kangaroo with a joey in her pouch.  We didn't actually get to see the joey stick its head out but we did see a leg pop out.

After the Zoo, everyone was beat, so, we tried to see a couple pieces of street art from the van.  We saw Terminator Cube (http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/34728) and Big Shoe Made of Shoes (http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/10976) but gave it up after that.  We stopped for groceries (we have a kitchen tonight) and called it a day, even though it was only 6PM.

Tomorrow, in St. Louis again.