Becoming Leona: City Museum!

I've traveled to Jamaica, Canada, Belize, Norway, France, Spain, England, and Italy. I've been to 23 states and plan to hit all fifty - hopefully I'll make that goal sooner rather than later. I mention this to give context when I say that last week we went to St. Louis' City Museum and to quote Tommy Boy, "I swear I've seen a lot of cool stuff in my life... but that... was... AWESOME."
There is no way to fully describe how cool City Museum is. You really just have to go experience it. I can't wait to go back. I loved St. Louis. I plan to go back when our kids are older and we can explore the city a little deeper and stay up late for a baseball game. I would guess when we return we will plan for two days in City Museum. It's like the Magic Kingdom of St. Louis: we'll have to go early in the vacation because by the end we'll be ready to go back again.
City Museum... holy mackerel... so, as far as I could tell, pretty much anything there is fair game for an adventure. It isn't really a "museum" per se. It's a playground, fun house, mad house adventure into wonderland. Unless it explicitly said, "do not climb on" - you could climb it. A small hole in the wall might lead to a passageway. Sometimes I would find an entry way and realize I was too big to find where it led. I keep saying there were things like cages on the ceilings, but they weren't really cages:

Do you see Chris in the picture above?

Perhaps cages" is the exact term for this. The ceilings were covered in these metal mazes and when you found an entryway you could just go up and crawl around. Eventually you would find a slide to get back out.

A tunnel would have a door in it that would lead to another tunnel. A hole in the floor would turn out to be a slide to the floor below... or perhaps the slide was longer than anticipated and you were going down more than one story. Chris went down a 10 story slide!
The record-holding world's largest pencil and world's largest pair of underwear reside there, which both turned out to be a "huge!" source of entertainment for Carolena.

There is a school bus hanging off the rooftop of this eleven story building...

that you can get in just to give your mother a heart attack...

Everywhere we looked there was something exciting to do. Slides, giant legos, huge chalkboard walls, a circus (yes, really), a kid-sized train that Carolena rode at least three times. Everything there was exciting and cool. And if it wasn't... then you just kept walking until you found something else that was.

While we were eating a pile of cheese fries someone crawling through a tunnel beneath our table reached out and grabbed my foot. Even having been warned by Chris to watch my feet, I let out a huge screech and jumped a mile. Moments later a gangly kid came and gave a giggling confession that it was he who had grabbed my foot. He was adorably proud. I'm glad my immediate reaction was to pull my leg away and scream so loudly.

There was more to do there than could be done in a day. We saw a one-woman circus performance (during which Carolena whispered to me, "I'm going to do that when I'm a grown up!"), and I got to run in a huge hamster wheel. In my humble opinion, I was amazingly good at it so let's add that to my resume when I return to the work force. Too bad we didn't get video or photo of that accomplishment. We ran around on skate park ramps,