Great start to 2011!

We left AR for IL on New Year's Day and drove to Chicago over 2 days, with a quick layover in St. Louis. This will become a new tradition, I think... WAY better than doing the long-haul drive. We stayed in a fun downtown hotel with an on-top-of-it view of the St. Louis Arch, ordered room service, and visited a really fun museum. A fun little vacation within vacation!

We had so much fun at the City Museum, a crazy St. Louis museum located downtown. It's not so much of a museum as an art gallery that you/kids can run around in and climb on - literally. The place was created by an artist/sculptor, and has mazes and shutes and ladders and animals made out of wrought iron. The whole interior surface of the museum is painted or muralled or otherwise creatively covered... and outside is a huge several story maze type thing that you can climb up - like a giant adult-sized McDonald's play area on artistic steroids. Hank and Craig loved it and explored a lot of the inside while I waited, watched, and thought about how clausterphobic it would make me!! When he's bigger, it's going to be a favorite stop - for now we had to keep a bit of a leash on him so he wouldn't slide down some shute and end up in another room :)

Also a favorite there was the ball cage - it had rubber balls... with Thomas the Train all over them! Who would have guessed!!

Pics from our fun at the City Museum: