St. Louis Trip::Day 5

Today I’m sharing about our last full day in St. Louis. At this point in the trip, Rob was done with his conference. We had a few hours in St. Louis before we ubered a rental car place that offers airport limousine services and Limo Rental Solutions so that we could go explore some other areas.

That morning we had tickets to ride up the Gateway Arch, so we got up early enough to walk there and grab some breakfast. We stopped at Chili Mac’s Diner (510 Pine St, St. Louis, MO 63101).

From there we walked over to the Arch and got in line because they hadn’t opened yet. The underground part of the Arch was recently updated. There is a really nice museum that shares St. Louis’s role in United States history, from the city’s founding in 1764 to the completion of the Gateway Arch in 1965. That is actually free. However, you will need tickets to ride up as well as the movie. We ended up just buying tickets for the tram up.

When you go to the line for the tram, they ask you several questions and then give you a number.

From there you watch a really cool intro video about the Gateway Arch. Then once it’s your groups turn, you all file in and stand in front of the tram car door with your number on it.

The ride up takes about 4 minutes. You are in a completely enclosed tram car.

Once you arrive to the top you climb out of the capsule and of course you find a sloped floor. I tried to get pictures to convey it for you.

They give you about 10 minutes to check out the views, which were pretty awesome!

The St. Louis side is gorgeous.

The Illinois side isn’t as pretty.

We walked around and checked out some of the museum.

Next stop was Park Avenue Coffee for some famous St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake. The first one we went to was sold out of the original, so we walked a couple blocks to another one.

It was yummy!

We had to get back to the hotel to check out and uber over to the airport to get our rental car. After that we were ready for lunch and wanted to try St. Louis style ribs. If you do that, you must go to Pappy’s!

The ribs were so sticky and sweet. Amazing!! Cannot recommend enough.

After lunch we drove through Forest Park, which is the largest urban parks in the United States. Yes, it’s bigger than Central Park in NYC!

We really wanted to go to the zoo. It’s free! However, we still had a couple more stops in St. Louis before hitting the road, so we decided not to this time.

When we were in The Hill (Italian-American neighborhood) earlier in the trip it was too late to stop by any Italian markets or bakeries, so that was a must do. We first stopped at Urzi’s Italian Market. We just walked the aisles wishing we had an Italian store like this near us. Anything and everything Italian from homemade pasta to wine to pasta makers and more.

Here is the dried Cavatelli, which is the pasta we home make.

Then we stopped atVitale’s Bakery. We got some Italian cookies, a Ricotta puff, and some Cannolis to over the next couple of days.

And as if we hadn’t seen and eaten enough sweets today, we had to make a stop at Ted Drewes for some frozen custard.

I will have to say though, we weren’t impressed with their custard. We both said that Culver’s back home is better. I’d like to try it again next time we’re there to see if its any better because people rave about this place.

And with that, we got on the road heading towards Columbia, MO and then to the City of Fountains. That will be my next travel post.