St Louis Family Reunion

From Alaska we took a plane to Chicago (on a plane all night, everyone was super grumpy) then to St. Louis. We got all our luggage and lugged it up to the rental car. The car was wayyy too small for a family of six even without a ton of bags so we were all squished together, six people in a five seater car, sharing with the luggage. And to top it off outside was like an oven outside except it was humid so it was like a pot of boiling water. Yeah. Gross. It wasn't so bad after a while when we cranked up the AC and stopped at Subway for lunch (EAT FRESH!!). We ate our sandwiches and drove to the Gateway Arch. That thing is giantly tall!! We didn't go on top of it but we decided that Percy Jackson was lying when he said he jumped off the Gateway Arch and into the Mississippi because the Arch is not over the Mississippi- there’s quite a lot of concrete underneath it though... (if you don't know what I'm talking about with all the Percy Jackson stuff, then you should go read The Lightning Thief or watch the movie or something). It was still boiling outside of course so that trip ended pretty darn quick. We then got back into the air conditioned car (thank god) and began driving to the Pere Marquette Lodge. We got lost about a million times (thanks to the Blackberry GPS which kept leading us to ferries that had stopped ferrying years ago and all sorts of dead ends and things) but finally we got to the lodge. We got checked in and brought all our luggage into the room. Then we all took a nap.

When we finally woke up a few hours later, we all took off to the pool. After we got out all the kids moved their stuff into the other room (which was a bit bigger than the parent’s room and daddy didn’t like that). Then we went to the lodge restaurant to eat dinner. In the lobby thing there is a bunch of games including checkers (which I am terrible at) and a giant chess board. Frank said it’s the biggest chess board in the US but I know for a fact that there’s a plastic one about twice that size in Avila Beach.

The next day we went to a 100 ft tall tower that you could see where the Illinois River joins with the Mississippi from the top of. It was pretty cool because one of the rivers was brown and the other was sorta greenish brown so you could see where they joined. Then we went to a Louis and Clarke museum and stockade thing. After we saw all that we went to lunch. It was really yummy!!! After we got back to the lodge we went swimming and Uncle Duncan and Aunt Eileen and Everett and Georgia (OMG THEY ARE SO CUTE!) arrived and everyone pretty much turned into their slaves haha. Then we had a fancy shmancy buffet dinner yummyumm.

The next day we went to another museum. This one was about a bunch of piles of dirt that some natives built a long time ago. It was amazing if your thought about it, but if you don’t, its just some grass covered piles of dirt. Then we watched a movie about it at the museum that talked about how they don’t know very much about the mounds except that they are old. Then we went to a winery in Grafton for lunch. When we got back to the lodge we went swimming and had some extremely violent chicken fights before dad came out and made us go back to the room to pack. When we finished that we went outside for a family picture that took like 20 minutes because there were a bunch of different cameras that it had to be taken with.  Then the whole entire family went to a restaurant for dinner. They took the kids orders last so everyone else was finished eating before the kids got served. It was good food though. When we got back to the lodge we said bye to all the people and went to sleep.

The next morning we woke up way to early and got in the already loaded car and drove to the airport. We returned the car and checked all our bags and boarded a plane to LAX. I <3 LA!!!!

Someone else gets to tell you what happened after that but it was super fun!!! I lovee California J!!!

~MiaIsCoolAndYouKnowIt