{"id":717,"date":"2004-08-05T18:48:00","date_gmt":"2004-08-06T01:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=717"},"modified":"2004-08-05T18:48:00","modified_gmt":"2004-08-06T01:48:00","slug":"the-wild-kingdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=717","title":{"rendered":"The Wild Kingdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

[For those not old enough to understand the relevance of the title: When I grew up, there was this program called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom<\/a>, and its longtime host was Marlin Perkins<\/a>, who was the director of the St. Louis Zoo]<\/font><\/p>\n

Today, we went to visit the St. Louis Zoo<\/a>. This is a 55 acre zoological park. Some exhibits are oldish<\/sup> (if you consider the 1970s old—I remember some from my 1987 visit); some are new housed in old (such as the herpetarium<\/a>); and some are new. My impression: On the whole, I like Los Angeles Zoo<\/a> better, but there are some exhibits in which St. Louis excels. <\/p>\n

So what impressed me? First, I always love the 1904 Flight Cage<\/a>. Although there weren’t as many birds as I remember, this is still a neat thing. Second, the St Louis Zoo has a new Penguin and Puffin Area<\/a>, a 41° enclosure where you can get up close and personal with the penguins (really… like inches apart!). We were also impressed with the Insectarium<\/a>, which provided loads of information about insects, quite a few specimens, and a great butterfly house. Of course, we saw lions, and tigers, and bears (I can hear you say “Oh My!”).<\/p>\n

What didn’t impress me? First, there was the woman with a shrill whistle, who kept whistling at the big cats<\/a> to get their attention. For once, I wished there wasn’t a fence. I couldn’t see that much of an improvement in the bear spaces, and I found the primate house<\/a> to be somewhat poor. I like the newer primate stuff the LA Zoo is doing.<\/p>\n

After the Zoo, we stopped by the Missouri History Museum<\/a> to hit the bookstore, as gf_guruilla<\/a> wanted to pick up a cookbook<\/a> or two<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We then visited a St. Louis institution: Ted Drews<\/a>, the home of Frozen Custard<\/a>. We had some concretes<\/a> (seemed like soft-serve to me), and then drove down MO 366, which appears to be part of former US 66, based on the motels.<\/p>\n

After that, it was dinner then back to the hotel. <\/p>\n

Tomorrow’s plans: gf_guruilla<\/a>, S&F, and Linda are going to visit the Eugene Field Toy Museum<\/a> and the St. Louis Art Museum<\/a>, while I go to visit the Museum of Transportation<\/a> in Kirkwood MO. This should be fun, as they have 27 diesel or other internal combustion locomotives, 10 electrics, one gas-turbine, 45 freight cars, 31 passenger train cars, plus street, interurban and rapid transit cars. I plan to wear my OERM<\/a> shirt and bring my OERM membership card!<\/p>\n

Update @ 9:04 PM: It appears the Museum of Transportation has an active Volunteer Group<\/a> similar to the volunteers at OERM. Further, it appears they are there on Fridays<\/a> running their trolleys. Wahoo! Us trolley fans are the same under the skin. I’ve already written their webmaster about including OERM<\/a> in their list of links of museums with active trolley lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[For those not old enough to understand the relevance of the title: When I grew up, there was this program called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and its longtime host was Marlin Perkins, who was the director of the St. Louis Zoo] Today, we went to visit the St. Louis Zoo. This is a 55 Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[205,17],"class_list":["post-717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lj-xfer","tag-st-louis","tag-vacation-2004"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}