Trip to St. Louis 2014, Day 4, Part One

If you ever go to St. Louis with kids, you must go to the City Museum.  The name sounds rather boring, but the place is anything but boring!  It is a bit hard to describe, but the whole museum has things built out of "found" materials from around the area and is located in an old shoe company.  And not just any things, but fun things, things to play on, climb on, slide down, crawl through.  It is a kids' paradise!  I don't know if my pictures can do it justice, but I will try. 

As you can see from the picture below, there is a whole area to explore attached to the front of the building.  I will show more of that later.  There is also a whole area on the top of the building, which costs extra, but we did not have time for it anyway.

The front of the museum. 

On the first floor, there is a very large area filled with fantastic sculptures, with paths going everywhere and things to climb in and on, many slides, both obvious and hidden.  It was amazing and quite crazy.  The kids absolutely loved it.  We tried to keep track of them closely at first, but we eventually gave up and stood in the main area, watching for them to reappear from who knows where.  There were holes in the floor, some leading to slides that went down to the basement, where they would have to climb structures to come back up.  Some of the holes led to paths underneath the floor and then the kids would show up out of some other hole.  Many of the places the kids went adults could also go, but some places required prolonged crawling that I didn't want to do.  :)

Climbing up inside a tree.

I see a head!  Some of the climbing actually took the kids up into the ceiling.

Way up high.

There goes Anne.

Dominic and Anthony explore.

We finally dragged the kids off to explore the other floors of the museum.  There were even ways to climb up and down between floors, also a big slide going from the third floor to the first floor. 

A cool mirrored tunnel.

Anthony was the only one young enough to ride the train.  The other kids climbed up into the ceiling and across, then down again until they ended up where you see the bars next to the train.

Anthony played in the little kids' area.

There was another very large room filled with ramps and giant bowl structures, with a maze under some of it.

Checking it out.

Dominic practiced his American Ninja Warrior moves.

Rope swing.

Too steep to climb, but made a great slide.

Before lunch, we made it to the magic show.  It was nice to have a rest and sit down for a while.

Waiting for the show to start.

A fun little break.

City Museum to be continued...