Hubby and I spent last weekend in the St. Louis, Missouri, area. Our baby girl’s first year away at Urshan College was ending, and it was time to figure out what to do with all her dorm stuff.
In addition to the move-out, her good friend who we’ve known since our Bible Quizzing days was also graduating from Urshan. We’d been invited to attend the ceremony and spend some time with her.
We’d carefully thrown together two small suitcases for our few days in St. Louis, only knowing that we’d be getting dirty at least one day with the move out and needing to be a little fancy for a graduation ceremony. Thursday morning, I put our dress clothes on the new valet hook in the closet and verified with Hubby that I had all the essentials ready to go. Then I went about all the other things in the house that needed to be done before leaving for the weekend. He surprised me by completing his packing on his own and had stowed our stuff in the back of the car before I knew it!
We had an uneventful trip, thank the Lord, and were getting situated in the newly remodeled Hyatt of Chesterfield (very nice) when Hubby asked, “Where’s the closet for our hanging up stuff?” Then he slowly looked over at me as we both realized in that instant that we didn’t have our hanging up stuff!
We’d been wondering what we’d do for evening, and now we had a clear direction. The nearby outlet mall would be closing in a couple of hours, so we made a beeline to it!
It’s a good one, so we both found the clothes we needed in about an hour’s time. Then we were off to see the baby girl.
She was a little stressed because we’d insisted she move up her check-out time from noon Saturday to some time Friday; her friend had called while we were driving to say she’d be available all day Saturday to spend time with us, and she’d never been to the St. Louis Arch nor the St. Louis Zoo!
Friday morning was a little hectic as we made several trips to the nearby storage unit and deep cleaned the room. The afternoon was a blur. Hubby and I left an exhausted daughter in our hotel room and explored the area near the hotel on foot.
The day was just gorgeous, with the highs in the upper 70s, a cool wind blowing on us as we toured an open house and meandered around a beautiful pond, complete with sculptures, a pollinator garden, and a waterfall. Dreaming of the possibilities, we hurried back to the room and got cleaned up and ready to fight traffic to the venue.
Surprising to us, traffic wasn’t too bad.
Urshan College graduated more than 120 students and announced that it would be Urshan University beginning in the fall. It was a lovely ceremony, but it was late when we finally made it back to the hotel.
Our graduate promised she’d be in bed early, because Hubby had made 10 a.m. reservations for traveling to the top of the Arch. She met us at the hotel at 9, looking a little frazzled and a lot scattered. Of course, she had been up socializing til after 2 a.m. with friends.
We piled into our vehicle and made it to our designated parking in no time at all. It seemed the whole city was still asleep.
The Arch is a lot more regulated these days than when we’ve visited in the past, and workers move people through the lines like clockwork. We had 10 minutes at the top, which was plenty of time to snap some great pictures.
We decided to head to lunch next. We all wanted to visit our favorite Israeli restaurant, OLIO. Alas, it was closed.
A search for Mediterranean food revealed a nearby Afghani restaurant, Sameem. It has rave reviews online. We were the first guests there, and it did look a little sketchy, but it was very, very tasty! We rolled out of there, determined to walk off the calories.
We plugged in the directions to the zoo next. Siri informed us that the 15-minute drive would be 45 minutes today. Indeed, we’d passed a long line of cars on the interstate earlier. The city wasn’t asleep after all; they were in line to go to the (FREE) zoo on this gorgeous 78-degree day!
We turned around and backtracked to downtown to tour the local IKEA. That took a little time, but it was fun as always, especially since our graduate was interested in getting ideas for a new apartment in Baltimore!
The zoo currently closes at 5, so Hubby decided we’d try to visit closer to 2:30. It was still a madhouse, but we were able to find parking and saunter around the exhibits, seeing most of the ones we’d hope to see, before it was time to drag our weary, stinky bodies back to our car, parked almost a half-mile away.
We left early Sunday morning, noting the beautiful weather we’d experienced, the gorgeous clouds the whole weekend, the fabulous food we’d enjoyed, and all the fun things we’d done and left undone. Luckily for us, our daughter still has a couple of more years at Urshan College, so we should have plenty of excuses for making more trips to St. Louis!
