thankful month: day 25

(I'm doing this late, with the excuse that we had three Thanksgiving dinners on Thursday and one on Friday . . . and uh, I don't know where the time went today . . .)

I am thankful for vacations.  

My husband and I were able to go to St. Louis, Missouri last weekend. Our girls were with grandparents, so it truly was more of a vacation than a trip. Why Missouri? It was another Army Yellow Ribbon event (our third together), with the flight, hotel, and five meals at no cost to us.  We had a late flight on Friday the 19th, so we went right to sleep. Saturday after the classes and dinner, we took four friends with us in our rental car and went to a museum we had heard about called City Museum. All I knew was it had a big slide. Well, it was so worth the money -- the way my husband described it was that it was the most fun he had had in years! It is hands-on fun, with a lot of exploring and crawling to do if you want to, and if you're brave enough.

After City Museum a couple of the guys asked if we could go to the casino, so we did for just a little while. My husband and I talked, drank a non-alcoholic drink, people-watched, and didn't gamble. Then back to the hotel because we had class at 8:30 a.m. again.

Our last instructor, Sunday before lunch time, was my favorite. He had a fun personality and lots of hilarious photos to go along with his advice. We had enough time to go to the FREE zoo with other friends (more who were in St. Louis for the event), find the LDS temple, get dinner, and hang out with people in the airport a little before boarding our plane. We got more good pictures than what I'm sharing here, but flickr was having trouble so I'll try again tomorrow.

The famous arch (we didn't go inside it, which costs extra).

You may think it's faster than the elevator, if you don't realize there are 11 flights of stairs!

Baby black bear sucking on its toes like a baby human does? :)

P.S. At the Hyatt a toothbrush and bag of Chex Mix will cost you almost $10.00, which the cashier will tell you right before you pay. However, I did enjoy them.