Saturday, June 25, 2011

Getting Kicks on Route 66

This morning we packed up the car (after we managed to get CJ off his newly discovered jungle gym on wheels) and headed to the St. Louis Zoo on the other side of town.
This is also where we officially began our Route 66 portion of the trip!!
The St. Louis Zoo is free, which is neat, but they do charge you for parking, the train, and the children's zoo...so it wasn't completely free! Ha ha!
CJ LOVES animals "man-a-mal", and birds especially "tweet tweet"s & "kak kak"s. He would have given this bird a hug if JT wouldn't have been holding him back!! Our son is not afraid of anything, which is a great quality at times, but can also be a dangerous one.
He really enjoyed the train ride, and kept saying "choo choo" as we rode!! :)
CJ is 33 inches tall according to his last Dr's appointment, but when we tried to get him to stand next to this sign, he couldn't manage to stay still long enough to get an accurate picture! Ha ha!
After leaving the zoo, CJ took a really good nap in the car, for about 2 hours. Then we made a pit stop for gas, bathroom & The World's Largest Gift Store! The three of us are in the picture under the "ES" just for an idea of how big it is!!
Our car made an important milestone during this portion of the trip, and I was SOO mad that I missed the picture! GRRR. 100,000 miles...Happy 100K Bonnie Blue (the name we gave our car on her last road trip across this fine country!)
We'd seen about 2500 signs for Fantastic Caverns (no lie!! This place advertises a LOT, but apparently it paid off in our case...) so we decided to stop and check it out. It is America's Only Ride Through Cave, which was perfect for us with CJ. (We had wanted to stop and see Meremac Caverns, but they didn't allow strollers, and we knew that walking for 75 minutes with a toddler in a cave would have been a nightmare!)
CJ was curious about his first cave experience!
We weren't sure how he would do riding for about an hour in a dark cave, but he did great!! The funniest part was every time the tour guide would stop the jeep to tell us about something, CJ would do the sign for and say "more". He wanted to ride more, so at least we knew he was enjoying it!! This is the only part of the cave that you are allowed to touch!
Bacon formations (because they look kinda like bacon).
Family picture in the cave! Note the one shoe on, one shoe off style of riding! ;)

Fantastic Caverns were just that: Fantastic! Ha ha!
We drove down to Branson, MO to spend the night, and the sunset was just gorgeous!!
More fun planned for tomorrow!

1 comment:

Sue said...

The other day I could not comment so I doubt it will take now...I am surprised that none of these places on RT. 66 doesn't have re-runs of the TV show as intertainment.