Well, no more excuses. It is finally time to blog about our vacation from back at the end of October. Better late than never, I guess.
(In case you are wondering why I find it so important to blog about these things…if and when I ever get around to scrapbooking all of the pictures from the last three years, inclusive of our time in France, I will rely heavily on my blogs. I do label my pictures as I upload them to the computer, but, if I don’t blog, I find that many of my best memories, which may or may not have pictorial evidence, disappear!)
My original plan for our October family vacation was pretty grandiose. As we are studying American history once again this year, I thought it would be really neat to visit the Williamsburg, Virginia, area. We visited Washington D.C. last winter, so I thought that another history-themed, yet fun, vacation would a great idea. We would drive out to and back from Virginia, making interesting stops along the way, and just have us a grand old time.
Then, reality started sinking in. We would be traveling with a six-month-old baby who would still need to eat every four hours. The drive, one way, is fifteen hours. When I started crunching the numbers, we would take three days to drive out, three days to drive back, and have maybe two days at our destination.
Then, Charlotte broke her leg, and that ended all delusions about a car trip to Virginia. As I started to think about alternatives, I remembered that a friend had mentioned that she and her family had spent a week in the Branson, Missouri, area in September and had had a really good, relaxing time. I ran the idea by Jeff, and it sounded good to him.
Voila. Our new vacation plans! I reserved a condo at Still Waters Resort on Table Rock Lake, close to Branson, and we were on.
So, on Saturday, 23 October, we headed south. As it was late afternoon before we could leave that day, we decided to break up the seven-hour drive down there by spending the night in St. Louis. The kids were still interested in going to the zoo, so we found a hotel about fifteen minutes away from there.
We arrived at the Hampton Inn around 9:30, and Jeff went inside to check in. We had reserved a non-smoking room with two queen beds and actually had the reservation paperwork to prove our request.
No matter. The clerk told Jeff that we had not specified a room type. When Jeff told her that we had, indeed, specified a non-smoking room, she told him that the hotel no longer had any non-smoking rooms available. However, she would upgrade us to a smoking suite.
While the suite was very nice and roomy, it reeked of smoke, as most hotel smoking rooms do. However, given the hour, we decided to just take it. This was not such a good call, as all three children, especially Jeremy, coughed all night. Grrrr.
However, Jeremy was just getting good at pulling up during this trip, so I snapped this picture of him at the hotel!
The next morning, we packed up as quickly as we could, ate breakfast, and got out of there, adding the Hampton Inn to our list of hotels that would not likely get our patronage again. (It joins the Baymont Inn and Suites, in case you are interested!) We headed to the zoo.
The cool thing about the St. Louis Zoo is that it is free. It does charge $11.00 to park, but only if you can’t find a free spot in the huge park that surrounds the zoo. We had found out on the website the previous night that, during the first hour that the zoo is open, the carousel and the children’s zoo are free. So, we drove in a little before the 9:00 opening time and found a free spot within sight of the zoo entrance.
We loaded Jeremy into the backpack and hoofed it over to the zoo. Our first stop was the carousel. I’m not sure how old kids get before they don’t want to ride carousels anymore, but ours are not there yet! We were the second batch of people to ride, so Charlotte and Elijah eagerly scoped out their animal of choice. I scoped out the animals that didn’t move for Jeremy’s first carousel ride!
After that, we headed for the children’s zoo, where the kids mostly petted goats that were trying their hardest to escape. The zoo docent who was stationed there told me, “Yeah, I’m pretty much here to make sure the goats don’t leave when the visitors do.”
We also managed to get Jeremy to look through this thing, which was pretty funny!
Our need for thriftiness satisfied (we managed to get out of here without spending a dime), we meandered through the rest of the zoo for a couple more hours. It was standard zoo fare, although very well laid out and nice. (I think we’ve just been to a lot of zoos.) Jeremy managed to take a nap in the backpack, and then I took a turn with him. Boy, is he heavy!
By lunch time, we were zooed out, so we headed back to the car. We stopped at Steak’n’Shake to feed Jeremy and us and then hit the road. We had another four hours to Branson.
And I’ll pick it up there next time!
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