America 2015: Day Fifteen (13 August 2015)

Everything is slower here, everybody's got a union card
They get up on Sunday, go to church of their choice
Come back home, cook out in the backyard

And they call this the Great Midwest
Where the cornfields grow and flow
They're all 5 years ahead of their time
Or 25 behind, I just don't know

                                                                                                                   - John Mellencamp

Thursday 13 August

Once again, the weather has played it’s part. Hard to believe we’ve been here two weeks now and we’ve yet to have a full day wrecked by the weather. Sure, the storms in and out of Milwaukee on Monday were pretty dire when they happened, but the sun was out either side. We’ve gotten very lucky, and long may that continue!

After a bit of a sleep in this morning, we had breakfast in the hotel dining room (which wasn't nearly as much fun as having it with Brooke, Miles, Paige and Jaimie!) and set out to do some sightseeing. This is our only full day in St Louis. We’re doing short stops to fit more in and see more people and places. In a way, it’s good, but I always discover things about these places that I wish I had time to see.



Of course, number one on the list of things to do in St Louis is that big structure that stared me straight in the face when I opened the blinds this morning. Colloquially known as the Gateway Arch – and St. Louis is colloquially known as the Gateway City – the structure that dominates all others in this city (and happens to be the tallest monument anywhere in the United States of America) is officially known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

Completed in October of 1965 and inaugurated about three years after that, the Arch cost about $180 million in today’s money, and stands at an impressive 630ft (or 192m for those following along at home). That height means there’s nothing blocking the view, and with visibility as good as it was today – read: excellent – the vista across the flat plains of Missouri and across the Mississippi River to Illinois was spectacular.

 

The most interesting thing about the Gateway Arch is the way you get to the top. They call it a tram, but it’s more a claustrophobic pod for five people, and in the style of ferris wheel cabins, they swing in time with the curve of the arch as they ascend or descend. Let’s just say it’s a fairly…active ride to the top. If you’re scared of heights and claustrophobic, do yourself a favour and enjoy the views from the ground. It isn’t worth your while.

The only thing that is a little disappointing about coming now is that the gardens and parkland all around the Arch are being ripped up and entirely reimagined. Based on the artists impression pictures they have in the visitor’s centre, it’s going to look amazing when it’s completed. Right now, though, instead of a sea of green grass stretching down to the Mississippi, it’s construction machinery, dust and workmen as far as the eye can see.

 

After lunch, we boarded an old-fashioned paddle steamer, the Tom Sawyer, for an hour-long cruise on the Mississippi River. Fair to say that it wasn’t as pretty as the Chicago River Cruise we did on Monday night. The Mississippi currently looks like the Yarra River in Melbourne did ten or twenty years ago. There’s an incredible amount of debris washed up on both banks, some human and some natural, and the water is the colour of mud. Even so, I’ve been on the Mississippi, which means I can tick it off my Bucket List.

St Louis really is crazy about baseball. You can’t walk fifty meters down the road without seeing someone wearing some sort of Cardinal-related clothing. So, it’s fitting that on our last night we headed to the ballpark again. That’s three games in a row, in two cities, for those playing along at home – and also the last ballgame of the trip.

 

It was a bad night for the Cardinals, who gave up seven runs in the first inning – if you arrived ten minutes after the first pitch, you were in for a rude shock – and although there were hints of a comeback at various stages, Pittsburgh were in complete control, eventually running out

As they say, it’s a small world – and last night I happened to be in the same city and ballpark as Chris Lane, a rising country singer who’s music made an immediate impact on me, and who is currently on an exhaustive national radio tour ahead of the release of new music later this year. It was great to be able to venture down to where he was sitting to take a photo and have a chat. Trust me, he’s going to be huge.

 

Well, we’re two weeks in and have about three weeks left of the trip, but already my envelope full of tickets and confirmation e-mails for various things – concerts, monuments, baseball games, memorials etc. – is getting thinner and thinner. That’s a little depressing, but we’ve got some amazing stuff still to see, including a bunch in the great state of Tennessee, starting tomorrow.