More of our Vacation: Days 2 & 3

On the second day of our vacation (which was a month ago now!) we did two major things: the St. Louis Cathedral and the St. Louis Zoo. The cathedral is the reason that we went to St. Louis instead of some other place like Branson or something. Matt's book is sort of set in St. Louis, or at least a based-on-St. Louis location, so we had to go to the basilica (this is also why much of our vacation is tax-deductible). The most important part of that trip was seeing the mosaics in this cathedral. They are simply amazing.

This is the world's largest collection of mosaics, designed by 20 different artists, covering 83000 square feet, including about 41.5 million individual pieces (called tesserae), 7000 colors (I didn't know there WERE 7000 colors). It took 76 years to complete.

If you go to the link above, you can take a virtual tour of the cathedral and see many of the mosaics. Even the children were enthralled, and we actually had to go back another day to see things we didn't get the first time. I think you could spend months in there and not absorb all the detail.

Then we went to the St. Louis Zoo. The St. Louis Zoo is free, and you can have a completely wonderful time and not spend any money there. We, however, at at the cafe, and then we bought passes to the extra things that do cost some money. It was worth it--the passes got us into the Children's Zoo, the train, the carousel, the Sea Lion show, and the 3-D dinosaur exhibit. All of which we did, sometimes more than once (we were hot and tired enough at the end that we rode the train through a couple of times before we got off at our stop).

It was the only really hot day of our trip, but even then it wasn't really hot. Not the usual Missouri-in-August hot that it could have been. It was nice to see the Sea Lions, because they splash cool water on you. I think that was David's favorite part; all day he was, "Can we go see the Sea Lions? Can we go see the Sea Lions? When are we going to see the Sea Lions?" It was pretty cute. I think my favorite part was the carousel and the train--yay for sitting down!

The kids were extremely good and amazingly non-whiney that day. Actually, they were very good and non-whiney for most of the trip. It was nice.

The next day, Monday, we stayed at our condo. We sat through a time-share presentation so that we could get tickets for a free dinner at the Tiger Rescue place--not a problem, since we KNOW we have no money to buy a time-share. Matt and I tried to get some writing done, but then I had a migraine and Matt took the kids out to the town of Farmington, went to WalMart and wasted time so I could lie down. When they came back, I took them to the condo pool for a while. We didn't go anywhere; it was really relaxing and nice. We ate in the condo, and didn't spend much money at all.