St. Louis, Missouri

We stayed at a state park out of St. Louis and took the Jeep in to town. I definitely would recommend that if you have a big rig. We went to the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center the first afternoon.  We have been to a few holocaust museums, and it still amazes me what people went through and that this could happen. There are many exhibits and survivor stories. The HMLC is located in the Kopolow Building on the Jewish Community Center campus and it is free admission. There was also free parking.

You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them.

     

The next day we started out at The Old Courthouse Visitor Center. That is the visitor center now for the Gateway Arch while they are doing construction at the Arch visitor center. We didn’t know that this was through the National Park Service. (Another Passport stamp!) It’s officially the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. The Arch is 630 feet tall. The total building cost of the Arch was $13 million. The visitor center is free, but a ride up to the top of the Arch is not. We also paid for parking downtown.

                      

Our next stop was The Economy Museum which is also free to the public. There are displays and short videos and a gift shop (and free shredded money!).  I guess we expected more, but we weren’t really impressed.

     

After this was a drive to the Cathedral Basilica.  The Cathedral construction started in 1907. It’s unique design combines architectures of Romanesque style on the exterior with Byzantine style interior. This is one of the largest collections of mosaics in the world, created by 20 different artists and covering 83,000 square feet. The mosaics were created with over 41.5 million pieces, in more than 8,000 shades of color. It was completed in 1988 and was designated a Basilica in 1997 by Pope John Paull II.  It is beautiful. There is no paint; it is all mosaics and marble.

          

For more pictures, please click here.  I’ve separated them in to four different files, so you don’t have to go through all of them.