8/26 - 27 - Rolling on a river

The famous St. Louis Gateway Arch.

After driving 14 hours, our longest continuous stretch, with one stop at Denny's in Nebraska, and Trista's first time taking over as driver so far, we finally reached St. Louis, Missouri, and were looking for accommodations. St. Louis was the only destination during our trip that we had planned to find indoor lodging once we were there because it was sort of a half way point and we wanted to make sure we could clean up and have a date night in the city, near the river. But, naturally, we wound up securing unplanned indoor lodging twice already prior to this due to unforeseen circumstances. We found an Economy Inn with great clean rooms for only $30 a night. It was forty minutes outside St. Louis but we were obviously looking to save money here and, honestly, you wouldn't have have known it was that inexpensive - the room was as good as anything at a Holiday Inn.

On the way into the city, we booked a very reasonably priced dinner cruise on a Mississippi Riverboat for our date. We napped in our hotel room, woke up to get ready and barely gave ourselves enough time to drive into St. Louis to board the boat. We departed at 7:30 and returned by 9:30. Dinner was a lovely three course meal with coffee and tea included, and because we may have mentioned it was our honeymoon (shhh), the bartender was kind enough to whip up some complimentary cocktails and the cruise director, Nick, was our personal waiter, attending to us on the, otherwise empty, second level. We each had a salad, then Adam had the prime rib for his entree while Trista had the fish (Alaskan pollack?) - both were scrumptious. For desert, two kinds of cheesecake: apple and raspberry. Yummy.

We were in food comas, but managed enough strength to walk the upper deck to enjoy with the other passengers the fresh night air blowing softly on us as the riverboat quietly waded us two miles up the Mississippi to gaze on the city lights. Quite the change of scenery from just a day before. Of the many romantic memories we share together, we both agreed this would be up there near the top.

After the cruise had docked and we exited the boat, we were presented with the photo packet of the picture we took before we boarded. We couldn't refuse such a nice remembrance of this evening so we purchased it. We were still fairly dragged out by the commute from the mid-west so we retired to our room for the night, where we caught the blog up to speed, perhaps for the first time, and easily drifted off to sleep.

We checked out the next day at eleven and drove back into St. Louis to restock some groceries and to ride up into the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, better known simply as the famous Gateway Arch. Unfortunately, we didn't leave much time to visit the Arch and left the "city by the river" without so much as a step inside its Visitor Center, let alone riding the egg-shaped elevator up to the observation deck all the way at the top of it. We had planned our stop through St. Louis for this very reason and didn't even do it. This is Adam's only regret about the trip so far. AND...no magnet again.

Oh well, we had a very romantic evening on the Mississippi River and we were now off to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.



About to board our quaint dinner cruise on the Mississippi Riverfront.


Our only footage together on the trip so far, courtesy of Nick, our waiter.