Wonderful Day with the Grandkids (Warning, lots of pictures!) (Scott AFB, IL)

Everyone loves pictures.  Follow us as we had a lot of fun with the grandkids today.

We went to St. Louis to visit the famous St. Louis Arch, and LaClede's Landing.  Then we finished the day by doing some geocaching.  Perfect day, weather-wise... temperature 87, humidity 39%, no clouds.

All four of us on the North end of the arch.  Kendall, Jim, Kyle, Dee.

Tram loading area.  Everyone is assigned a door depending on the size of their group. Each compartment seats five.

At the end of a 4-minute tram ride you follow these steps up to the top.  There is a tram at both the north and south sides of the arch.

Ruth is a friend of mine who works at the arch. She's explaining that if winds kick up over 35mph the trams stop. The caretakers then have to bring the trams down manually. The arch sways in very high winds, and she said sometimes it's hard to stand up. There are many safety features and they're prepared for all kinds of emergencies.

These are the windows at the top, 630 feet above the ground. They're slanted about 45 degrees forward, so you have to lean up into the window to look down.

Here are some photos we took through the windows. You look out at downtown St. Louis on the west side, and the Mississippi River on the east side.  The view was beautiful on this perfectly clear day!

The river is rising.  Sometime in the next 24 hours it's expected to cover the road where we were today and it will be closed to traffic.  It's already up on the steps

And into the road

When we lived here we went downtown quite a bit and we had our favorite nightspot at Laclede's Landing called "Muddy Waters."  Laclede's Landing is about a 10 square block area with cobblestone streets and very old brick buildings.  It used to be a great hangout with a vibrant nightlife, but now it's run down and very few places are open. Muddy Waters is gone, and in its place is the "Show Me" grill.  We had lunch there for old time's sake.  Sure wasn't the same.  :(  We were wondering if they were still around, now we know.

We decided to go Geocaching with the kids since it was a little cooler than it has been lately.  We took off for a couple finds. This one is a regular cache that has all kinds of little things in it.  I'm glad we found it for the kids.  You trade items.  I carry things from one cache and put it in another. The kids loved it.  They found three out of three today.

When we left I noticed something on the window.  We must have picked it up at the cache site.  This is a little tree frog.  He hung on for quite a distance.
 

It was after 2:00 when we got the kids back home.  We got back to the base and found several people have moved in.  We may go out and meet people this evening when it's a little cooler.  No storms are expected so it will be nice to get out and walk around.

Thanks for coming along today for our trip to the St. Louis Arch. I hope you enjoyed it.