St. Louis, Missouri

I am blogging from the road! It's 5:16am as I start this post and we are in...Kentucky, I believe. We've driven through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio (Oh wait, just kidding, we're in Ohio).  Josh and I took 5 Hour Energy today at around 9pm last night when we decided that we'd do the stereotypical roadtrip thing and drive all the way through the night.  Normally I suppose, you'd trade off with your partner--one sleep while the other drives and then the trade off. We decided that'd be too lonely of a drive, thus we clinked our 5 Hour shots and bottoms up! Hence the soon-to-be sunrise that we'll witness (first one of the whole trip, and in romantic Ohio too). Oh, I guess I failed to mention where we're heading. We're going home! 

We had a lot of fun in our short stint in St. Louis. We stayed for three days because it poured our first day there, making it kinda silly to pay to go up into the Arch. But we went yesterday.  Josh has already been up in the Arch once before with his family a long time ago. Which turns out to be a good thing because they don't allow wheelchair users to go to the top. It sucks but also makes some sense because in order to get to the trolleys you have to go down numerous flights of steps and then once you're in the trolley, it's about the size of a toilet stall (except shorter) and then at the top, there's a bunch of stairs too. We've brainstormed how to make it accessible and we think it'd work but somehow I don't think they'll be altering the monument anytime soon.  But yes, I went to the top and didn't have a panic attack in the tiny trolley. Although, it was a close call, ha. The view was pretty incredible.  It felt higher than the Sears Tower (ahem, Willis Tower) even though it was only about half as high. 

The Arch

The door to the trolley. It's four and half feet high. That's it.

The sign at the top: 630 ft. whoo hoo

Funny little corridor at the top with little windows to look out  at the city below

The inside of the trolley. Looks a bit like five toilet seats...

View from the top

Josh hung out in the Museum of Westward Expansion and learned about Louis and Clark’s expedition across the western portion of the U.S. as well as meandered around an art exhibit.  I came down to meet him and we looked at the art together then and had ourselves a good life lesson. We each picked out our favorite piece and then showed it to the other. It turns out that because of our literal physical perspective, we each passed over the other’s favorite.  Due to our physical angles and the light casting a glare, neither of us saw the beautiful intricacies of the paintings.  Until further inspection (due to each other’s encouraging) we didn’t see the specialness and uniqueness of the art. It was a fun realization and we decided that it was a good dose of perspective—which is healthy from time to time (as long as it doesn’t coincide with a piece of humble pie—which no matter what anyone says, isn’t a tasty combination).

And then today, we went to the City Museum. If you have kids or know kids or are a kid inside of an adult form, take off work and drive to Missouri and go to the City Museum. It. Is. Amazing. It is one large jungle gym. It is every kid’s dream come true and gives every adult that spark of playfulness. Anywhere you went inside the building you could hear exclamations of ‘This is so cool!’ There are kid-sized holes in every nook and cranny of the place. Holes which, no matter how much you might want to, if you’re the parent, you just ain’t following. Unless of course, you are only three feet tall and the width of a green bean. 

Stuck in a tree house

In the course of our day, we cruised down slides, met some dinosaurs, chilled with the stalactites (mites??) and traversed the body of a whale, Jonah style. I also went down a ten story slide. Actually, to be honest, it was ten stories to the top (that's a lot of stairs) and seven stories of slide, by hey despite the false advertising it was still way cool. The museum certainly wasn’t your traditional museum. Nothing stuffy about it. The third floor did have a more traditional take on museum stuff though. It had old architecture stuff, pieces of famous buildings, collections of door knobs and marbles, and a whole lot of circus stuff (did I mention there’s a circus school also inside the museum—like legit circus school? Bendy people and juggling all that on a bouncy trampoline.) It was really, really awesome.

Slide number one of many during the day. It was kinda painful to my bum...

T-Rex fossil inside the caves. Really big chompers on that sucker.

Inside the human sized kaleidoscope 

A little half-pipe action in the skateless park (yes, skateless)

Oh, did I forget to mention that the museum is home to the world's largest pencil? With an eraser that actually works and  lots of Pennsylvania graphite in the tip.

The more traditional portion of the museum had old toilets?

Really fun slide!!

Josh did it too!!!!!!

It was an epic museum. Full of fun and imagination and playfulness. Things we like very much and in the course of the last two years, have lost some of. It was good to tap into it again and be reminded of how playful we can be! 

It's now 5:56 (took a really long time to upload pictures with a mobile hotspot) and the sky is beginning to lighten. We're about 10 miles from Columbus, OH. If all goes well, we'll make it to our lovely little home sometime today sometime just after lunch. Unless we fall asleep. In which case, who knows. We're going to get back to our audiobook (in the course of our trip we have listened to Prey by Michael Crichton, The Help by Kathryn Stockett and now we're onto Term Limit by Vince Flynn) and enjoy the coming sunset. 

See you all soon!

Chicago!

Well, it took us over a month and 3600 miles to finally be in another time zone but here we are.  We spent the last week outside of Chicago in Naperville, Illinois. We spent our first night there meeting up with one of Josh's old buddies from high school, Mark, and his wife, Bonnie.  We went over to their apartment in downtown Chicago and caught up on life and hang out for a bit with their doggie, Bella. They live about two blocks from Lake Michigan in a cute apartment in a very tall building--with a doorman! Afterwards, we headed over to Millennium Park to take some pictures at one of the famous sculptures, The Cloud Gate, or more affectionately known as The Bean. We parked and walked over to the sculpture garden and took about three pictures before a security guard informed us that the park is closed and nicely told us to 'beat it'. Apparently it closed at 11 pm. It was 2:00 am. Fair enough.  But this is The Bean....

We were pretty determined to get a good picture though so we planned on coming back another night.  We met up with Juliann, who goes to school at Wheaton College and got her off campus for awhile and she showed us around the city.  We decided to go to this little German Christmas market in the middle of the city and we had a lot of fun there.  The vendors were people from all different areas of the world selling handmade goods from their respective countries.  Aaannnddd food of course. We had bratwurst and sauerkraut and latkes.  I can't say the bratwurst was very good.  Not my thing but dessert was pretty exciting.  Another stand had chocolate covered everything.  We got some grapes and marshmallows and Juliann got a baked apple with marzipan in it.

We had fun :)

And then we tried to go back to The Bean. Did we look at the time? Nah. We got there and had 30 seconds in front of the sculpture before we got kicked out this time...

But we still got one sort of good picture with the glasses on :)  But our most epic day was most certainly Sunday. Juliann, being the crafty college student she is, found out about this deal where you can usher for a Blue Man Group show and get in for free (just pay for parking).  Tickets are normally $70 a person so this is an amazing deal.  So we started off our outing at Portillo's, a local hot dog place to have ourselves some authentic Chicago Dogs.

They are delicious. If I could design the perfect toppings on a hot dog, this would be it.  Then we made our way to Northern Chicago to go to the show.  Oh yeah, we had to stop at Filene's Basement so that Josh and I could get the black pants/white shirt combo necessary for ushering.  So we showed up to the theater and everyone is very low-key and thanking us left and right for ushering. I felt like we should be thanking them for letting us see the show for free! All we ha to do was direct people to the general direction of their seats, hand them a program and tell them to enjoy the show.  Then we got to see the show in the fifth row from the front! It was an amazing show.  It was like a sensory rodeo, appealing to each of the human senses.  Very interactive, musical (everything from Ozzy Osbourne to Beethoven), hysterical and thought-provoking.  There was  a call to recognize how much time is spent in front of and inside of technology. The show was family friendly but full of sarcasm and other jokes to appeal to the older members of the audience. Then all we had to do was clean up after the show!  It was such a good deal and so much fun to be a part of!

Blue Man!! 

It looks like joshjosh got kissed by the Blue Man! He took the paint from right off his head and put it on josh's cheek :)

After the amazing show, we went for some more authentic Chicago-ness and got some deep dish pizza from Lou Malnati's (apparently the place to go for pizza). It was delicious.  

It looked way better in the pan.

Then, third times the charm, we went back to The Bean for some pictures.  This time we left ourselves three hours in which to get the perfect picture.  It only took an hour, which is good because our fingers and toes went numb! But we had a blast being silly and taking fun pictures in Millennium Park...

We took a head lamp with us to play with lights and the exposure time 

:)

Getting squished by the Bean!

The Bean with the cityscape in it

We said good bye to Juliann and Josh and I headed to the Sears Tower the next day.  In 2009, the Sears Tower was renamed because the rights to the name came up for renewal or something like that and whoever bought it (I assume someone named Willis) renamed it to be the Willis Tower. Apparently you can just do that.

Anyway, we went up all the way to the 103rd floor! It was the fastest elevator ride ever experience by the two of us.  It took only five seconds (I counted with Mississippi's and all!) per ten floors. And the elevator swayed on the way up. But once at the top, you can see for miles!

Insane, right?

On the 103rd floor was the Sky Deck, an all-glass deck which you can go out onto and look straight down to the street below. Waaay below.

Love at 1300 feet

We are at the bottom of Illinois now,  just outside of St. Louis.  We're headed to the Arch!

The truck is definitely getting its workout!

Grand Rapids, MI

Sorry for the delay in getting the latest post up.  We are in Napperville, Illinois currently.  We are planning on seeing Josh's (and mine now too!) sister, Juliann on Friday.  But we spent this past weekend with our friend Ryan, who Josh roomed with at Messiah.  Ryan lives in Newaygo, Michigan.  He recently started working at Camp Henry, a summer camp for youth. As we drove through the center of Michigan, we were rather surprised at how much there isn't. We passed only a few things in the three-ish hours it took us to get from Ann Arbor, including, Taxidermists, Deer Jerky Specialists (I'm not sure the exact job title of one who makes jerky), Pet Grooming and that's about it. Once we hit Newaygo, not much changed. But it is still a cute little town and Ryan showed us the highlights of the town the first night we were there. He took us to the Jerky shop which had pretty much every flavor of jerky you could think of. It was pretty good.  The next day we met up and Ryan took us to the Frederik-Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids which are grounds of over 135 acres of gardens (indoor and outdoor) and sculptures.  We spent most of the time inside as the weekend was cold and rainy most of the time.  We did venture out a little though because the woman who sold us the tickets told us that no matter what, we had to go see "the horse" outside and "the ceiling" inside the cafe.  She was very cryptic which intrigued us.  So we did see that right before we left. More about that later though.  The inside of the building was home to Christmas trees from all over the world, each decorated in a fashion true to its country's traditions and mores.

From Japan's tree

Underneath Ukraine's tree

From Iceland's tree

Denmark's tree

It was awesome to see how each country decorates its tree! We spent some time looking around the gardens and greenhouses inside. There were some crazy looking plants, flowers, trees and cacti.

Weird worm-y cacti that look more like bacteria under a microscope than cacti  

These birds almost flew right into josh's head. Which had a humorous quality to it.

Fun Christmas decs in the trees for the birds :)

There were also a bunch of miniature buildings inside.  Each building was  made to be a replica of some famous buildings around the local area.  Many of the buildings also had some significance to the Frederik-Meijer's, who were the couple that donated and helped to create the gardens.  The best part about the miniatures is that they were created out of pieces of nature: eucalyptus, acorns, branches, maples leaves and more!

A replica of a local church.

If only I could figure out a leak-proof way to shingle our ceiling out of hand-painted eucalyptus

Materials for the miniature buildings

We went outside to the sculpture garden then to find the horse that the ticket lady told us about.  We followed the footpath and found a few fun sculptures along the way:

They made me pose in front of this statue.  Turns out this one was called Mad Mom...

It was only fair....

The Frederik-Meijer's

So we continued down the path towards the horse....and Josh spots it!

We got to at the end of the path and were a little confused at why she was so sure we had to see it. Because it looked rather ordinary to us. What do you think?

Yup, pretty ordinary.  And then we turned around....

Now it makes sense....

The famous ceiling.  Reminded us of the Corning Glass Museum.  So pretty!

We had to get a picture of the speed limit on the way out.  It was very specific.  

Ryan took us out to dinner at the HopCat.  It was delicious!

The building just outside the bar had gargoyles on top of it.  Their eyes even lit up red!

After dinner we drove back to Camp Henry and we looked at our plans for the rest of the trip.  Ryan tried to help us plan out our routes.

There was a brief moment where we entertained the idea of getting a puppy and coming home. There was a sign for Rottweiler puppies on the way to Grand Rapids and we really do want a puppy.  It's so cold and rainy and we're both feeling kinda travel-worn and so we really did entertain the idea of getting one of those puppies and coming home.  We thought we could finish the trip later when it's warmer with a dog! That could be fun too!

But sanity prevailed and we're not getting a puppy. Yet. We are however, going to drive home for Christmas and then after spending the holidays with family, we are going to clean out the trailer (take out some of the stuff we haven't even used yet...).  Then, we're heading south. To the sun and warmth which we miss. A lot.

We had a blast with Ryan and really enjoyed getting to discover Grand Rapids (and Newaygo) with a friend! Oh and p.s. one last picture is posted just for you, Mark Manbeck--Ryan reminded us about this: