Everyone needs to see it...

Dean and I drug our sorry butts out of bed New Year's Eve day at 5:45AM and I slithered to the car to go back to sleep while Dean undertook captaining the 4 and a half hour drive to...

ST. LOUIS!!!!!

That arch is crazy tall. It's actually 25 feet taller than the Space Needle. Write that tidbit in your journal tonight.

Dean's so strong that he bent that big old piece of metal in half. Check out those guns.

I can hold up 5199 tons of steel with my index finger. Can you?

St. Louis lovin'.

I love how he just has this casual "I do this everyday" look on his face.

YAY!! WE'RE AT THE ARCH!!!!...

...SO I WILL DO A BALLERINA LEAP!!!!...

...AND FINISH IT OFF BY INTERCEPTING A PASS AND SCORING A TOUCHDOWN!!!!

Classic dean and chelle self portrait right next the the shiny arch.

Spider-Dean, Spider-Dean, doing whatever a Spider-Dean does...

Must.....climb.....to....top. Too......cheap....to...pay.....for.....observation.....deck......tickets....

Adam, you have a hotel and you never told me? I'll forgive you this once but I want to know who this 'Mark' fella is.

And now the main reason we went to St. Louis. Dr. Gunther von Hagen's Body World exhibit. If you have never heard of it, go to bodyworlds.com and check to see where the nearest exhibit is to you, and then immediately go buy tickets and go. I'm not kidding, everyone needs to see this exhibit. It's an eye opener. Our bodies are fascinating, and this gives you a much better perspective on how intricate the body is. The exhibits are actual dead people and they have each gone through a 1500 man hour process of dissection, and plastination (the process of injecting them with a reactive polymer the preserves the tissues in their ideal state). It's nothing disgusting and the exhibits have no identifiable features that give them character or personality. Dean and I were both amazed at how well the bodies were preserved and how you could identify every single muscle, artery, nerve, vein, bone, etc. It gives you such an appreciation for how Heavenly Father created our bodies, and how we are just at the jumping off point of starting to understand our own species. Point being, you need to go see this.

This is an example of one of the plastinates that you might see. They don't let you take pictures in the exhibit so I Bogarted this picture from the internet. Those are actual bones, tendons, and muscles you are seeing. They look just like how they do under your skin while you're alive. It's amazing. We spent 2 and a half hours in the exhibit when it should have only taken us an hour and a half max. Dean had fun playing tour guide to me through the exhibit and he loved being able to answer any of the questions I had. It was also a good review for me because I had just learned all the muscles in the body in school so it was such a help to actually see them in person. We are going to be going to the Body World 1 exhibit in Milwaukee sometime this month or next month. There are 3 exhibits that tour in the US and we went to the Body World 3 exhibit.

After we were done at Body World, we went around the rest of the science center and they had a whole area on the human genome. Hence, the double helix.

Now the GIANT double helix. Anyone ever seen the movie GATTACA?

Can't talk. Studying to find cure for cancer.

Umm, honig!? You know there are no strings on that harp, right?

And of course we had to get Jack in the Box tacos on the way home since the geniuses here don't think it's necessary to have one within 100 miles of Davenport.

~

It was a wonderful, exciting, and educational trip. We would do it again in a heartbeat even with the 5 and a half hour crazy icy and snowy drive home. Oh well, Happy New Year!!!