Vacation! Part III

Since we had already driven all the way to St. Louis for Eddie Vedder, we decided beforehand that we would make a mini-vaycay out of it and stick around for Fair St. Louis!  This is a huge 3 day festival downtown complete with fried stuff, live music and fireworks!  We also had a couple of college friends in the area that we wanted to catch up with.  

John got us a great deal on a hotel right downtown on Hotwire, that is the website where you say what kind of hotel (how many stars) and where, and name your price.  They'll get as close as they can and then you pay for this hotel upfront, non-refundable, before you even find out what hotel it is!  It was a bit scary, but we ended up at The Westin and were SO happy with that outcome!  Here's a view from our room:

So we slept in on Saturday, awesome.  Then we ate our breakfast in bed (granola bars and apples!) and watched tv for an hour or so before we headed off to meet our friends for lunch.  It was heavenly!

We had parked our car at my friend and old college roomie's house the night before and were taking the metro.  This saved us $20/day on parking!  Holy Cow!  So between that, and her lending me everything I would wear/use for the weekend, she was quite the lifesaver and I need to get a nice gift in the mail...So anyway, we took the metro down to her house and she cooked us a delicious lunch!  Then we went out to Ted Drews (legendary!) for frozen custard and then off to the (free!) Science Museum to entertain ourselves!  St. Louis has a huge amount of free entertainment, besides the Science museum, they have the free zoo and an Art Museum also.  We just didn't have time to do it all though.  

It's been a while since I'd been to a science museum, and I felt a little funny going with out a kid, but it was really fun!  There were lots of things that I wished Will could have seen, but I had fun on my own pushing buttons and playing around without worrying if he was wandering off or getting hungry/tired/thirsty/dirty/sleepy.  Here are some examples of the super educational fun we were having!!

A lot of the architecture section was very *Arch Oriented*

Ahhhh!

These seats were in the space section, but I'm not sure why!!

After the museum, we ate some very delicious mexican/texmex for dinner!  Some of the best chips and salsa EVER!!  I know!  In St. Louis!!  I'm as surprised as you are....

Then it was off to the Fair, just in time to catch Steve Miller Band!!  They performed right under the arch and put on a great show!  A little hokey at times, but so much fun!  We walked up right as they started Big Ol' Jet Airliner!  

Steve Miller finished with The Joker and was directly followed by fireworks.  Such a fine day, we had a blast!