Crossing the Country Day 3: Missouri to Nebraska

When we planned our route across the country, one of the things we planned our stops around was botanical gardens that we could get into for free with our membership from the Norfolk garden. The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis was the one we were most excited to see, and that is where we started the third day of our trip.

 Driving across the Missouri River into St. Louis. Sarah was very excited about the "rainbow."

 This garden was huge, and it was so beautiful! This was the original building in the garden from a long time ago, and it was surrounded by Victorian gardens.

 Riding the sheep was very exciting

 Inside the "Climatron", a huge building with a rain forest inside.

 Checking out the glass "bubbles" floating in the pool in front of the Climatron.

 Just smelling some flowers.

 They had a fun kids zone with a cave full of fake rock pillows and little cubbies with stuffed animals hiding in them. Sarah was a big fan.

Reading some books with Daddy in the rock pile.

We only had a couple of hours to play in St. Louis, but we would love to go back there. It looked like such a fun city to explore.

From St. Louis, we took a slight detour to drive up to the tiny town of Mt. Ayr, Iowa. As we started researching Kelson's family history, we discovered that many members of his family emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine and settled in Mt. Ayr for over 100 years. Since we were coming within an hour or two of the area, we just had to go see it for ourselves. 

 The drive through the Midwest was a little more boring than the previous day's drive. Flat, newly planted fields as far as we could see.

 Some of Kelson's ancestors founded and lived in a town just outside Mt. Ayr called Lesanville. It is basically a ghost town now, but some of the buildings have been restored as part of a living history farm. It was so fun stopping to see the places we have read about in our research.

 There was a tiny cemetery in Lesanville filled almost exclusively with Kelson's relatives. This is the grave of Elsie Green, Kelson's Great Great Great Grandmother.

 Clifford and elephant helping explore the cemetery. 

 The church and schoolhouse in Lesanville

 We walked around downtown Mt. Ayr, which took about 5 minutes, and then had some yummy pizza for dinner at the only restaurant in town. We managed to end up in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere with 1 or 2 restaurants to choose from almost every day at dinner time.  This may look like Kelson and Sarah were sharing bubble gum, which is disgusting, but I believe they were actually playing tug-of-war with a straw.

 Enjoying a beautiful view as we drove out of Mt. Ayr

 Halfway there! (Or at least we thought we were. On recalculating, we realized that our detour into Mt. Ayr meant that we were actually still a couple hundred miles short of halfway.)

 We ended the day with some swimming and relaxing at the hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska. Sarah LOVES swimming. 

What better way to wind down than getting a hand massage while wrapped in snuggly towels? Our little girl is so pampered :)