Day 2 - St. Louis - Cafe Provencal & The Magic House

Today for lunch we went to one of our favorite restaurants in St. Louis, Cafe Provencal.







We started with a wonderful steaming hot plate of escargot in garlicky butter sauce.




I ordered Beef Daube, which had such an amazing rich red wine flavor.



Mimi got fresh trout, which was perfectly cooked.  The fennel flavoring made it exquisite.  Mimi commented on what a very large piece of fish it was, but she somehow managed to eat every bit of it.




We loved this huge old poster for escargot.



After lunch we headed to a children's museum called The Magic House.

At the entrance, there is a lovely sculpture of children playing Ring-Around-The-Rosie with an opening space just the right size for a real child.  Mimi spent some time getting Sweet Pea adjusted so she could play too.

There were several other sculptures of animals.  It does not look like it in the photo, but this snake was extremely realistic and a bit terrifying.  Sweet Pea was brave enough to try to feed it.




Sweet Pea was able to ride in a train, blow the whistle and even shovel pretend coal into the hopper.




There were tons of fantatic activities for kids.  Below Sweet Pea was sticking transparent pegs into a light board to make them glow.




Sweet Pea is looking in a little cut away "mouse hole" in the wall that had little pretend mice in it.



There was an entire "pretend" town filled with a life size library, vet's office, bank, utility company, pizza shop, auto repair store.  It was like a child's wonderland.

Sweet Pea served us ice cream from an ice cream cart.




There was a pond with real water and magnetic fishing poles so the kids could "catch" magnetic fish.



Sweet Pea cooked and served us pizza at the pizza parlor.



There was a hospital nursery filled with "newborn" dolls and lots of ways to care for them.  Below Sweet Pea is taking care of one of the babies.



Later, we saw a Lewis and Clark exhibit.  Just as we were about to enter one section of it, a museum guide yelled after us, "There are tunnels and slides."  We swung over pits, crawled through tunnels, went over rope bridges and went down slides.  It was quite an adventure.



On our way out, we stopped to take this picture of the entrance.

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Location:Day 2: St. Louis - Part 1