St. Louis is for Dinosaur Lovers

Our road trip from Indiana to Arkansas is ten hours long. It's four hours from our home town to St. Louis, Missouri, and six hours from St. Louis to my parents' house.

Thank gawd for St. Louis.

Sometimes we leave for our trip in the afternoon, when Matt gets off of work, and then we stay overnight somewhere and finish our drive the next day. Sometimes we leave for our trip bright and early in the morning, the girls fresh out of bed and still in their pajamas, and we finish our drive MUCH later that evening.

We always, always, ALWAYS stop in St. Louis.

St. Louis, how do I adore thee? I love your City Museum, every last inch of it. I love the zoo, with its insect building. I love Turtle Park. I love Whole Foods and the Container Store, right in the same strip mall. But most of all, I love the St. Louis Science Center, which is in the ASTC Passport Program along with the Wonderlab, and thus affords us membership rights.

Sometimes I'll do my research ahead of time when I know that we're going to stop for a couple of hours at the St. Louis Science Center, to see if there's anything we want to see--we saw Bodyworks there, for instance, and another temporary exhibition of film special effects. Sometimes, however, I don't bother, and then we're simply happily surprised, as we were to show up at the St. Louis Science Center on Sunday afternoon and discover that our membership rights got us half-off into the museum's current temporary exhibit, Dinosaurs Unearthed.

Hmmm...does anybody in this family like dinosaurs?

The exhibit was AWESOME, with plenty of animatronic dinosaurs, and PLENTY of crazy-cool fossils. There were dinosaur heads:
And dinosaur feet:
And even, both girls were DELIGHTED to note, dinosaur poop:There were T. Rex chicks with feathers and T. Rex adults without feathers, and an icthyosaur embedded fossil that Willow recognized by its eye sockets and a plesiosaur fossil that she recognized by its flippers, and even the littlest member of our crew found a shout-out to her very favorite film of all time:
It was the perfect complement to the Land Before Time DVD that they got to watch in the car on the next leg of the trip.