My Town

Chris and I like to call Sparks "My Town," like the song by Montgomery Gentry since we have worked on so many houses there and befriended so many of the people. But I guess the original "My Town" would be Kirkwood (St. Louis), MO, where I grew up, although Chris liked to point it out everytime I didn't know where or what something was, which was a lot. That's why God invented Mapquest ;) I think I managed to be an OK tour guide though, especially since there a TON of free things to do there. Here is a sampling about our adventures:

Our first full day in St. Louis started off with toasted ravioli on The Hill, St. Louis's Italian neighborhood. It hit me when I was captioning my pictures that this picture is of a Hill on the Hill! Later on we toured the Anheuser Busch brewery, then after dinner we went to Ted Drewes for the BEST frozen custard.

AB had all their Christmas decorations up and it was so pretty!

Me and my friend Erica, who drove up from Springfield to spend the day with us, in front of an old-time delivery wagon.

3-story chandelier at the brewery.

Sunday afternoon, which was GORGEOUS, we went to the Arch with another of my friends, Katherine.

I hadn't been there since probably a Girl Scout trip in about 4th grade, but it's actually pretty photogenic.

Views from the top...

Busch Stadium!

We walked down by the river after we came back down and walked around the Museum of Westward Expansion. It was pretty high b/c St. Louis got more rain in the month of October than El Paso gets in a year.

Me in front of the Old Courthouse. The most famous trial held there was that of escaped slave Dred Scott.

I am seriously going to get one of these and wear it while I'm doing construction...it has a brim to block the sun plus it would stay on my head if it were windy or I had to bend over for some reason.

I love this angle...even though Katherine had to lay on the ground to get it!

We went to the zoo the morning before the conference started since we had a few hours to kill and I have seriously never seen the chimpanzees as active as they were then.

I tried this picture like 5 times until I finally got him to look at me.

If you look really hard you can see the Arch from these railroad tracks that go through Kirkwood not very far from my house. We drove over them a bunch so we finally had to pull over and take a picture.

The night before we left, my whole fam plus Chris and I went to Citygarden, which is a new addition to downtown STL...basically the city just barracaded off a couple of blocks and installed all these sculptures, which are then lit up at night. They are working with the Missouri Botanical Gardens to landscape it too. I thought it was very cool and would totally go back again.