All Around Town

Brad's mom and dad were here last week for their first visit to St. Louis. After a weekend of baseball, beer, and trivia, starting on Monday we visited some of the sites around town. We started with the most iconic, the Gateway Arch.

We took the four-minute tram ride to the top and enjoyed the view. This is Geneva and Chuck at the top.

This is the view west, looking towards town. (The Mississippi River was right behind me.) Underneath the Arch is a small museum and theaters to see two films. One of the films is about the Lewis and Clark expedition. (The Arch is a monument to that expedition.) The other is about the building of the Arch. They're both great, but the film about the building of the Arch is really fantastic. (And in researching it for this post I just learned it got an Oscar nomination in 1967 for Best Documentary Short.) Whether you've been to St. Louis or not, it's worth watching to get a firsthand view of the architectural, engineering, and construction feat that was the Arch project in the 1960s.  All I could find online was the three minute teaser. Here's a link to it. The full half hour version is better but I can't find a link to that. So you'll just have to come to St. Louis to see it!

The next day (night) we were back at the ballpark to watch the Cardinals lose (again), this time to the Brewers. It was a treat to see the Brewers, but it was quite chilly.

By Wednesday we were ready for some more St. Louis history - and more beer! Geneva and I took the Anheuser-Busch brewery tour. This tour was great. The brewery's history (and most of its buildings) date back to almost 150 years ago. So it's part of the fabric of the history of the city. We loved it.

Maybe you can get an idea from this picture the attention to detail inside the brewery. It was normal for its time but of course not what you'd expect in a brewery.

The tile work was very pretty. We learned that this fox ("Renard the Fox") was the mascot for a non-alcoholic beverage that Anheuser-Busch produced during prohibition called Bevo.

And yet it was a factory - a beer factory. As these upside-down bottles flew by us a sign to the adjacent canning line said it cans 1,950 cans of beer per minute. A whole lot of beer gets made inside this sprawling factory.

The samplings were generous and at the end of the tour we were treated to a glass of beer in the new Biergarten.

Continuing on a theme, the next day we visited Grant's Farm. This is the Busch family's country estate, which they bought from President Ulysses S. Grant (who had married a woman from St. Louis and for a time lived in a cabin on the property). On the estate is a horse farm, one of four in the country where the Budweiser Clydesdales are raised. (The others are in Boone County, Missouri; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Merrimack, New Hampshire.) We took a behind-the-scenes tour and enjoyed two hours learning about Clydesdales.

It was great to see the horses up close. These young ones were super playful. It takes at least four years for them to get trained to be in the "hitch" - which is what they call the group of eight Clydesdales pulling the Budweiser wagon. To get chosen as a Budweiser Clydesdale, the horses have to be a certain size (huge!) and a certain coloring. When it comes to choosing Clydesdales, there is definitely not equal opportunity employment!

There were only five of us on the tour so we got some quality time with our tour guide and with the horses. At the end of our tour our guide showed us a short film with some "highlights" of the Clydesdales' commercials. One was a 9/11 tribute they filmed with them, which she said was only broadcast twice. We hadn't seen it before and even though it was commercial, it was really quite moving. Maybe you haven't either - here it is if you want to see. (It's only about 30 seconds long.)

As you can see from our jackets it was another chilly day but we were so interested by the horses that we hardly noticed.

On Friday we enjoyed spending some time after work at a wine bar with John and Brad. By then the weather had started to turn better (this weekend it's been in the 70s and 80s) and it was a perfect way to start the weekend.

John said goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa and by the next morning we did too as they headed up to Iowa. We enjoyed the chance to spend time with them and to see a lot of interesting places in St. Louis!