St. Louis, Missouri

We set an alarm last night so that we would wake up in plenty of time for a reservation we had for a cave tour today.

Asa and I researched different caves in the area yesterday. Some were in the $30 range for adults and $20 range for kids. I looked at every cave in the area and found two that cost about $12 for adults and $8 for kids. Asa looked up how much time these two would add in driving and Fischer Cave was the closest to our planned route. We booked our tickets for 11:30 and it was 2.5 hours away. We planned to leave at about 8 which would give us an extra hour of grace time.

An hour or so into the trip, we stopped at Uranus Fudge store. We had seen a sign for this place yesterday and thought it seemed funny (plus we love fudge!).

The staff may have been the happiest retail workers I’ve ever met. There was no shortage of “Uranus” puns from them. We got fudge and cinnamon roasted nuts. The lady at the fudge counter told us “Thanks for letting me pack your fudge. Now I’ll grab your nuts.”. I asked if they take American Express and she said, “We take it all in Uranus”. When I used tap to pay, there was a “Thanks for tapping Uranus.”. It probably doesn’t seem that funny as you’re reading this but Asa and I laughed and the jokes went over the girls’ heads. They had a playground and museum here but we needed to get to our cave appointment!

At the state parks, they call their rangers “naturalists”. Our naturalist led our small group on a 1.5 hour tour of the cave. The kids loved it, there were lots of cool formations and the small group was really nice. The cave is located in Meramec State Park so same area where the Meramec Caverns (famous Route 66 stop) is located. Meramec Caverns was one of those $20-30 tours and I’m sure they had more than 7 people on it!

After the cave tour, we stopped at the visitor center. They have a Junior Naturalist program but it was very involved so we didn’t attempt it. We did check out the visitor center though.

After that, we stopped for gas. Across the street from the gas station was a Route 66 themed splash pad. We decided to check it out since it was 95 degrees out.

Then we stopped at Culver’s for a late lunch/early dinner.

We got to our BW site for the night around 4. It is located about 25 miles southeast of St. Louis in Illinois. It was crazy hot so we dropped the camper and headed into St. Louis to cool off and decided not to come back to the camper until the sun was down (we have no electricity here so no.air conditioner).

We visited City Park first and played in their fountain style splash pad.

They had lots of sculptures on display here and others had small water features too.

About a block away was Kiener Park. They had a fountain style splash pad and a playground.

Finally we made it to Gateway Arch. This is a National Parks Service site so we worked on Junior Ranger badges and explored the free museum.

This site is open until 8 and we stayed until they closed. It was starting to rain outside but we decided to try and walk to the car which was 10 blocks away (we parked by City Park and walked to the Arch). The rain was coming down in sheets and we took shelter under an overhang for a while.

Eventually we went for it and made it back to the car. It rained hard the whole way back to camper then dried up when we were just blocks away. Oddly it hasn’t rained here at all but that was great because it gave us a chance to set up and not get soaked again. A rain storm did come through shortly after that but it didn’t last long. By then we were all tucked in and changed into clean dry clothes.