St Louis

Hi All,
On 17th July (Weekend), we (I and my parents) went to St. Louis. (Missouri State)
Click link, if you are really in hurry and can’t afford to spend time in reading the full description
http://picasaweb.google.com/bharat7480/AaiBabaUSTripStLouis#

We left Ottumwa, early in the morning at around 7.30 am. We headed straight to St. Louis Zoo. This Zoo is spread out in 90 acres and is home for almost 5000 animals from 700 species. We saw many animals, birds, insects for the very first time in our lives. My cousin Anup, who is doing his MS in Rolla (near to St Louis), joined us after a while. We saw the sea lion show, took a ride in small train that encircles the zoo. We were tired with long walks in the zoo, as we came out of it at 7 pm almost after 6 hours.
We decided to go to St. Louis Arch and reach the top of it so as to see the beautiful sunset on the banks of Mississippi river. (Yes, the Sun sets at about 9 pm, unlike what we see in India.) But to our bad luck, the tickets were sold out. So we booked next day’s tickets and called our day off. We drove to Anup’s house that night and stayed there. We enjoyed the special dinner prepared by Aai and soon found ourselves in deep sleep (6 hours of walk trails in zoo proved too tiring to keep us awake).
The next day morning we decided to talk a walk around Anup’s University but it started pouring cats and dogs. We changed our plan and choose to go beneath the ground level into the great caves of Onondaga. Onondaga caves are about 30 miles from Rolla. Deep underground there is a world that nature has created using water to form deposits of tall stalagmites, dripping stalactites, active flowstones and many other colorful deposits. We took a cave tour of about 1.5 hours and were amazed to see the cave scenes.
As we came out of caves, Sun was shining bright again, cheering us to go on with our travel plans. We went back to Rolla and had a short walk with Anup around his university. Missouri University of science and technology, as the name goes, has Engineering, mathematics, science and computing study programs to offer to about 7000 students. We were fascinated to see the huge library and Anup’s mechanical department lab.
As time was running short to reach St. Louis gateway arch, we dropped Anup back to his home and with pleasant good bye from him and his roommates, we rushed towards St. Louis again.
We reached at about 4 pm to Arch. The gateway Arch is built as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States. This Arch was constructed in 1965 and is 630 feet (192 m) wide at its base and stands 630 feet (192 m) tall, making it the tallest monument in the United States.
There are trams (egg-shaped "elevator") from both ends of Arch which go right to the top of the arch. We had a classic view of St. Louis city and Mississippi river from the windows 630 ft high above the ground level. There is also a small museum which exhibits ancient Native American culture and description of American journey towards west.
It was past 6 pm when we were done with lots of photos in and around Arch and had to resume our journey back to Ottumwa...
Thanks again to all who dared to read it till end. Enjoy the photo link…. Cheers….
http://picasaweb.google.com/bharat7480/AaiBabaUSTripStLouis#

Regards,
Bharat