Our Trip to St. Louis

Back at Easter we were sent an Easter card from our good friends, Caleb and Ashley Dickison. Inside the card was an invitation to Caleb's surprise birthday party in St. Louis. Apparently Ashley was planning a big party for his 25th birthday. Robert and I decided that we would go and surprise everyone. We were supposed to RSVP to either Ashley or Caleb's mom, Lisa. Well, Robert of course wanted to surprise everyone so we didn't.

Long story short, we went to St. Louis hoping that the party was still happening and it was. We were able to surprise several groups of people that weekend and we had lots of fun doing it. We first went to the mall and surprised Lisa, Jordan and Brianna. Ted was in on it so that he could get the rest of them to the mall. Lindsey ran up to the group (with us watching from a distance). They looked at her and kept saying, "what are you doing here?" and then they finally saw us. We then spent the next couple of hours with them eating and talking. It was a lot of fun.

The next day was the party but we first went to the St. Louis Zoo. (Which, by the way, is a great zoo. And it is FREE!) More on the zoo below with pictures. Fast forward several hours to the party. We walked in and were able to see Caleb and Jordan's grandparents, Charles and Ruth. They weren't expecting us either so that was great too.

Then Caleb and Ashley arrived (Caleb in blindfold) at the church building. He of course was surprised by it all and had no idea that we weren't supposed to be there. Ashley, on the other hand, came and hugged us and said "I didn't know you guys would be here". So we got to surprise her too.

All in all, we had a great trip to St. Louis. Lots of fun with friends (and my parents in OK on the way and on the way home). It was a long drive but the girls did great and we enjoyed (almost) all of it.

Now for the good stuff - the pictures!

Robert always gets the best hotels. Right outside of this hotel was an area with restaurants, comedy clubs and dessert places. It was neat to walk out and find it all. Here are the girls in that area and I just had to get them on camera playing.Bow head!

Who me?

Lindsey's turn for pictures.

She's a cutie!

I can almost do it myself.

At the St. Louis Zoo. Lindsey loved the chart with all the butterflies to help identify which ones you see.

One of my favorites, the Red Postman.

The Blue Morpho, Lindsey's favorite.

And of course, right outside the butterfly place there were very pretty flowers so we stopped for a minute to enjoy them and take pictures.On to the River's Edge. And the hippos. There were four hippos in all but these two were putting on a show for us. It was neat to see them fighting right in front.Reagan was interested in the elephant while he was eating the straw but as soon as he started walking toward us, that was it. She was ready to go as you can see.This little penguin was posing for me. I couldn't resist taking a picture.

Reagan didn't care for much that we did at the zoo. Especially the penguin place - it was really loud during feeding time.

Another ham for the camera. But so pretty.

Lindsey liked the penguins though. I tried to get a picture of one swimming behind her but it didn't work.

Grizzly bear (in case you didn't know).

The girls watching the flamingos. Again, Reagan liked them until they started moving toward us.Because the zoo was free and so was our parking, Robert decided that Lindsey could get something at the Build-A-Bear that is in the zoo. They had some great animals like a stingray, yellow poison dart frog, spectacle bear, and giraffe. These are animals that they don't have in the regular B-A-B's so we thought it would be fun. Lindsey chose a giraffe that we named Spotty. And she did it all her self - stepped on the pedal to fill it up, put the heart inside, everything. She had never done that before - it was great.

Here we are at the entrance. This was us this year and we have a picture of the 3 of us (Robert, me and Lindsey) from the first time we went to this zoo in 2006 but it's not on the computer so we just have the hard copy in a photo album somewhere.

After the zoo, we had to drive into Illinois to say that we had been and on the way back there was some air show going on. We all had a lot of fun watching the airplanes.

Every bridge we would go on, Lindsey would ask if it was the Mississippi River so we were sure to point out the one when it was actually the Mississippi River.

And you can't make a trip to St. Louis without seeing the Arch. So here it is.

Like I said, we had a great time. St. Louis is a neat place with fun things to do. I hope that we can go back again when Reagan might actually enjoy the zoo and everything else that we do.