I was planning on incorporating all of the events from Saturday in St. Louis into one post, but then I found myself committing to way too many photos....so I decided to split the day in half.
I had mentioned to Ingrid before our trip that a vacation for me is basically a reason to eat delicious food in a place that is not your home. For some reason I almost always remember most of the meals that mark a vacation, like our family vacation to Lancaster, PA when I was in second grade will always come with fond memories of an amishman waving a thank you to my parents' as her spread manure in a field for not taking pictures and also of a trip to KFC to get coleslaw and biscuits to bring back to the hotel for our family. And my roadtrip with Caton, while epic in many ways, is poignantly marked with the memory of the delicious fried okra I tried for the first time in Memphis. On a school trip to Poland, while everything about the trip was amazing, I will never forget the periogis at a restaurant in Krakow square or the raw fish platters served to us during a meeting with a farmer. I will probably always maintain that England is only an okay country for no reason other than I didn't have any really incredible meals during my trip. You get the point and I just got a little carried away with vacation memories. What I'm really getting to here is that Ingrid really took this statement to heart and delivered a weekend full of delicious food. This breakfast at Soulard Coffee Garden is no exception and the breakfast burrito I had there will forever be in my vacation memory file.
After breakfast, we spent the remainder of the morning methodically perusing the St. Louis Zoo and taking in all the animals. Aubrey LOVES animals, but surprised us all by taking each animal in stride and just looking forward to the next sighting rather than becoming consumed with the animal in front of her. One animal she really did get excited about was the hippo. I think this is because it kept swimming in a circle and coming back up in the exact same spot.
She also really enjoyed the butterflies.
Ingrid warned us in the beginning of our adventure that she LOVED sea lions and that became very obvious when we actually came across the sea lions. As soon as their habitat came into sight it literally took every fiber in Ingrid's body to stay on the path to get to the exhibit and NOT cut straight across the grass Once inside the very awesome exhibit (you are actually surrounded by water and sea lions on every side except the floor) she watched the sea lions and exclaimed, I love EVERYTHING about this exhibit.
There were a lot of penguins, but this one in particular looked a little worse for the wear. Martin affectionately named him Scragglepuff.
And by the time we left, Aubrey was truly tired - falling asleep on Martin's shoulders before we even made it to the car.
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