Our travels today took us from Tulsa to St. Louis, our hotel across the street from Gateway Park and the Arch. We drove through St. Clair, Missouri, which was named after an engineer for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, not for Major General Arthur St. Clair.
We spotted license plates from Arizona, Arkansas, California. Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana. Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, along with on Sac and Fox and four Cherokee plates.
We also discovered an interesting phenomenon as we crossed central Missouri. We saw several cars on the road with no license plate at all. I don’t know whether that is some sort of statement or just an attitude of some residents of the Ozarks that it is not necessary to register their cars.
Robert scheduled us for the movie that described the design and construction of the arch, fascinating stuff for an architect. Akalena listened patiently without complaining. Between the movie and our scheduled tram time, we had forty minutes for a quick tour of the museum. Covid policy for the trip to the top meant each family group got our own tram car and our own set of windows for viewing. In our allotted ten minutes at the top Robert, Akalena, Adventure Bear and I viewed the Mississippi River and saw a barge coming down the river, On the other side we saw the city and the old courthouse,
Back on the ground, Akalena saw her first real live squirrel and got very close to a mallard duck. Real excitement for someone raised among coyotes, roadrunners, and lizards.
Dinner in downtown St. Louis was a different matter. Not many of the restaurants in the downtown area were able to survive a year without tourists, and many of those that did were closed or understaffed. We stopped at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Because of reduced staff, they were only partially open and had an hour wait for a table, beyond the capacity of a starving seven-year-old. The host was very helpful, and we were able to get a take-out order to carry back to our room in less time than it would have taken to get a table.
Tomorrow we cross the Mississippi and head for Ohio.