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Saturday, August 23, 2008, Campground six miles west of Grafton, Illinois
We got up early for our big day. We wanted to make it to the Saint Louis zoo by 8:00 am to get in free to the children’s petting section (after 9:00 it’s $4.00). The entrance is free to the other sections and we really enjoyed it. The penguin display was my favorite; it was a cool place in more ways than one. I also liked the big cage you could walk through and see hundreds of beautiful and colorful butterflies. By 12:30 we were all getting tired and hungry because we hadn’t eaten anything before we left, so we ate lunch at the Emperor’s Wok, a Chinese buffet, and got our money’s worth. After eating we went to the Science Center, which was a hands-on center with lots of interesting things to see and do, kind of like the Exploratorium in San Francisco. I was so tired, though, that I fell asleep on a bean bag chair. By the time we left, it was about 3:30 and we still had to see the St. Louis Arch, so we drove there and the kids all got out to walk up the steps while I got bike directions out of the city. We finally left the city about 4:30 and headed for the town of Grafton at the Illinois border. We had to take a ferry to cross into Illinois; that was fun. On the ferry a nice couple told us of a good campground 6 miles outside of Grafton in the opposite direction of what we were going. However, it was getting dark and we needed a place to stay, so we pedaled over to where the police station was supposed to be to ask if we could park our bikes there for the night. Unfortunately, it wasn’t there so I asked some people at a store if they knew how I could get in touch with the police, and a nice teenager, Cody Sutton, said he could help us. He ended up letting us store the bikes in his uncle’s shop and told us to call him in the morning. Nice guy.
Then we drove to the campground, set up the tent, took showers, and went to bed. 18 miles.