This summer we decided to do a really ambitious trip--25 days in which we would drive from our home in Indiana to national parks in Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington. And I decided we might as well throw in a stop at Gateway Arch on the way!!
Note: this trip required an insane amount of planning. Truly insane. We had nine places to work out lodging for, 25 breakfasts/lunches/dinners to plan (which also meant planning very detailed shopping lists for our two resupply days), three different people joining us at various stages of the trip, a number of places where we needed timed entry permits or ticketed passes or ferry reservations, plus doing all the logistical planning to get all of our gear into our minivan and pack it compactly enough so that we would be comfortable riding together for approximately 72 billion hours. I cannot possibly overstate how complicated this was and how many hours I spent just working out all the logistics, THEN planning what we were actually doing at each place!! It was a lot.
Anyway, first stop was St. Louis! So we could make dopey faces, apparently.
We've been to Gateway Arch before, but we've never taken the time to actually go inside and do the visitor center/tour thing. So this was our moment! (I still hold firm to my belief that this should not be a national park. National monument is fine, but it does not deserve national park status.)
That feeling when you look at the map and realize that you're going farther than the actual Oregon Trail went...
Our main focus on this little trip was riding the tram to the top. We split into two groups since each tram holds five people. This was my group, I can't remember what we named ourselves but it was funny.
After waiting in a long upstairs hallway for awhile you go into a room where they show you a little video (just more waiting essentially) and then you go down and line up in front of your tram door.
The doors are not large.
The doors are glass on the inside so you can see the interior of the Arch, which is actually very cool.
Super cool for all these little engineer brains.
At the top of the Arch, you have...not long? Under ten minutes. But it's long enough because really all you're doing is checking out the view.
City on one side...
And big muddy river on the other! (You can see a lot more of the river but it's not particularly exciting, so I thought it was more interesting to see the size of the windows in relation to the view.)
All in all, it's a fun thing to do once, but once is enough.
And then we were off!! Next destination: Great Basin National Park in Nevada.
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