Monday
That's me, standing with Chuck Berry on Delmar Boulevard in Clayton, Missouri. Clayton is one of St. Louis' most famous suburbs (after Ferguson, of course) and is so much a part of St. Louis, our tour bus went there, Delmar Boulevard is listed in all the St. Louis travel books, and the City of St. Louis put two of its 250 birthday celebration birthday cakes there. St. Louis native Chuck Berry still plays in Clayton about once a month, at the Blue Berry Hill bar, which is right across the street from this statute.
I really enjoyed St. Louis. Among the cities I've visited that are about its size, I rank it second:
Nashville
St. Louis
Pittsburgh
Memphis
Detroit
Cleveland
Unfortunately, Marie and I were hampered in our ability to enjoy one of St. Louis' premier attractions: its bar life. We twice took the kids out to eat in a bar neighborhood (Laclede's Landing), where I drank quite a bit (and then proceeded to lose too much money at the neighboring casino), but other than that, we were shut out of the bar scene.
The best part of the trip was the bus tour we took Wednesday morning. I highly recommend bus tours of cities you haven't visited before. I saw things I wouldn't have picked up on, like the spot where, legend says, Stagger Lee shot Billy (he shot that poor boy so bad), where ice tea was first made, the the advent of the ice cream cone. One other thing I quickly discerned: St. Louis is still a bit too proud that it hosted the World's Fair in 1904. If I had a dollar for every time the tour guide or some other St. Louis resource referenced the 1904 World's Fair, I'd have all my casino losses back.
We took the Arch to the top, but my vertigo got the best of me (I could've sworn the Arch was swaying, much to my wicked children's merriment) so, after a robust 150 seconds at the observation deck, I took the pod ride back down. I'm glad I did it, but I wouldn't do it again.
The two best parts of St. Louis were the City Museum (too bizarre even to describe, but an anarchic, do-what-you-want exploration playground for kids and, ahem, immature adults) and the St. Louis Cathedral. The mosaics at the Cathedral are simply mind-blowing.
Two of the worse parts of St. Louis: a general dearth of family-friendly things to do downtown and The National Shrine of Our Ladies of the Snows. The Shrine is across the Mississippi River in Illinois, so we stopped by on our way home. The grounds are beautiful and peaceful, but its church and other features are bland, testaments to that deplorable Catholic architecture and church design that, I think, caught fire in the 1950s and proceeded to defecate on all that's beautiful and sacred in Catholic America for the next fifty years. The Shrine's church, to be brutally frank, gave me the willies, though that may have partially been the result of my hangover. In any event, if you want a peaceful place to walk around outside, go to the Shrine. For an awe-inspiring visit, don't go to the Shrine.
