October 16, the 17th day of our Mississippi River Run tour. We are halfway through already! We’ve been so busy and having such a good time it’s hard to believe so much time has passed!

Today we visited Forest Park in St Louis, which in addition to being a huge and lovely city park, has also hosted the 1904 Worlds Fair and the 1904 Summer Olympics. The 1904 celebrations coincided with the the 100th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, a very proud event in St Louis history.

St Louisians (like our tour guide) are happy to point out that Forest Park is larger than Central Park in New York. It houses the St Louis Zoo, the St Louis Art Museum, a golf course, the Muny (an outdoor theater), a rowing course, fish hatchery, tennis center, cricket pitch, planetarium, baseball diamonds … it definitely has something for everyone! We could have spent days here – a round of golf would have been great! – but since we had only a short time we had to be satisfied with a drive-through tour and a stop at the Art Museum for photos.

Our next stop was the Missouri Botanical Gardens. This beautiful place is not part of Forest Park, but is a short distance away. Even though many of the gardens were already put to rest for the winter, there was a lot to enjoy here.

We began at the Climatron, a controlled environment under a geodesic dome housing a tropical rainforest.

We emerged from the Climatron’s warm humidity into the crisp autumn air. The colors and shapes of the season were waiting for us.

The botanical garden features a sizable section dedicated to “home gardening.” There are ideas here for landscaping and for kitchen gardening. It was especially nice to see so many veggies still thriving this late in the season!

The botanical garden features an area dedicated to George Washington Carver. Carver was a native of Missouri who had an enormous impact on agriculture in the South especially. His place of honor here is beautiful and richly deserved.

After an excellent lunch at the Garden’s cafe (best Bloody Mary ever!) we visited St Louis Cathedral. This building features spectacular mosaics throughout, especially on the high altar and the ceilings. Gilded tiles make the mosaics sparkle. Somehow this building felt more like a palace to me than a church, can’t really explain why. It certainly is impressive though!

We finished up our day with a tour of the Anheuser-Busch brewery. The St Louis brewery is home base for the company that has probably done more to make beer the national drink than any other. Even if you don’t drink it yourself.

We were fortunate that the famous Clydesdales were in town during our visit.

The Clydesdales’ home at the brewery is a round brick barn with spacious stalls and stained glass windows. They seemed to enjoy the attention of their visitors!

We began our tour of the brewery proper with the beechwood aging vats. Beer is aged for 21 days in these giant stainless steel vats along with large chips of beechwood. This special treatment is given only to Budweiser and Bud Light. The vats are 20 feet in diameter, 60 feet long, and there are six of them in this room. Honey, that’s a LOT of beer!

The buildings that house the brewery are all original in design. They give the sense of being in an old village rather than a modern city.

The brewing operation inside these buildings is thoroughly modern with all the latest technology, but it looks like the lobby of an elegant hotel.

On our way to the bottling plant we were introduced to a couple of characters from the company’s past.

Last stop on the tour was the completely automated packaging facility. This plant can handle bottles or cans. It can package a lot of beer in a day when going at full capacity. Which is a good thing since the company ships 850,000 cases a DAY out of its warehouse nearby. Whew! Does anyone drink water anymore?

Before we left, we all got bottles of Bud Light and free pours at the beer garden. You know I’m not a beer drinker, but that Bud Light actually tasted pretty good!