A Lost Afternoon . . .
Saturday, 5/23
Jan’s sister Debbie and her husband Jim picked us up at our motel about 9am, and we all headed down to the Denny’s to meet up with the rest of the clan.
After another great meal we all piled into 3 cars and headed into St. Louis for an afternoon at Grant’s Farm in St. Louis. But it did not work out that way.
Grant’s Farm was the home of Ulysses S Grant, where he lived from 1854 until the beginning of the Civil War, and farmed and raised cattle. In fact, Grant’s home is still preserved here. At some point it was bought by the Busch family of Anheuser-Busch fame who opened it to the public as wildlife reserve/petting zoo in 1954. They even have Clydesdales.
So it sounded like a really neat place. But apparently it sounded that way to everyone else in St. Louis, because it seems like they all converge on the place on Saturday morning.
After an hours drive from Vandalia to St. Louise, it took us over another hour backed up on the main highway to finally turn into the park, and another 30 minutes to get to the entrance.
After that long wait, everyone needed to use the bathroom, and by ‘everyone’, I mean everyone in the park, and we found the potty lines were over an hour long. After suffering through that, we found the line to actually walk into the park was another hour.
And by then the park would close in about 90 minutes.
At this point we decided to call it a day. We had dinner reservations for 5pm, and wanted to be sure we could get over to St. Charles, MO by that time.
Leaving the park we saw at least part of the reason for the bottleneck. To walk into the park itself you have to cross the entrance road where everyone is still trying to enter in their vehicles.
So they stop the traffic let people cross and then stop the people to let the traffic come in. And as we left the cars were still trying to come in.
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It’s now almost 11pm Monday night and we want to be on the road by 6am for our 2 day 1500+ mile trip back to Prescott, AZ tomorrow. So I’ll finish the rest of this later.
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Thought for the Day:
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.” – Groucho Marx
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