Friday, August 6, 2010

The Midwest--July 2010--Day #5 Memphis to St. Louis

We started Tuesday morning at this Visitor's Center...Memphis, Home of the Blues, Birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll.

B B King

Elvis

We took the monorail to the River Park on Mud Island...actually a peninsula jutting into the Mississippi River. There were shops and "The River Walk" a half-mile-long concrete scale model of the lower Mississippi (Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, Louisiana) displaying every twist and turn with flowing water and inlaid street maps of major towns. It is constructed of layered slabs with each 1" layer representing 8 feet in depth. Every 30" step you take corresponds to one mile

Photo of the river and de Soto bridge from Mud Island.

One of four or five panels showing the headwaters that form the Mississippi. Water was running along the little grooves (rivers), joining together and dumping into the "River."

Oh, and there were flowers, too.

Near the beginning of the River Walk.

The map of Memphis is on the left including bridges across the river.

Standing in the Mississippi.

Black-eyed Susans.

Walking in the River!

At the end there is a 1-acre pond representing the Gulf of Mexico. Dad is standing on a map of New Orleans.

Mural of Tom Sawyer...well this is Mark Twain country.

Next we drove on to St. Genevieve, Missouri, a National Landmark Historic District settled in the late 1740's! by French Canadians. The French-Colonial style buildings were charming.

Thought of Briton when we saw this store front.

Mural on the side of a building

The Felix Valle home is a State Historic Site.

Bolduc House..notice the hip roof and the vertically placed timbers.

Bauvais-Amoureux House

More vertically placed timbers.

Soybeans in St. Genevieve.
An abandoned house over-grown with kudzu.

That evening, in Florissant (suburb of St. Louis) we went out for dinner to try some popular local food favorites...deep-fried ravioli and St. Louis-style pizza (very thin crust with a topping of parmesan and provel cheese...yum!) Then we met a missionary from our ward, Elder Adams and took him and his companion out for sundaes.

2 comments:

Autumn said...

The River Walk minature of the Mississippi is really cool! That would be neat to see and walking in the river/playing in the gulf looks like it would be fun. St. Genevieve looks like lots of culture and history. Did you get to go into the houses at all? Sounds like you guys ate well...yummy food is half the vacation right? Looks like it was sunny most of the time...was it super hot?

Airie said...

I agree...that river walk thingy looked neat...needs some plastic trees and dinosaurs though, hehehe. ;)