The Gateway Arch

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

If you can’t make it to the Arch in St. Louis, try this at home:

[ul]
[li]Run your dryer for five minutes to get it nice and hot[/li][li]Put a bright white light inside it[/li][li]Crawl in with 4 of your closest friends and close the door[/li][li]Wait 4 minutes[/li][li]Crawl out the exhaust vent until you get to where the vent exits your house[/li][li]Peer outside[/li][li]Crawl back to the dryer[/li][li]Wait 3 minutes[/li][li]Crawl out[/li][/ul]

You’ve just had the St. Louis Arch experience. And I saved you 10 bucks.

2

Frommers called. They thank you for your interest, but they are not hiring at the moment.

3

You forgot to add…
[ul]First, get drunk[/ul]

[ul]Stand in line for like, an hour [/ul]

[ul]about half way through, fart[/ul]

4

My dad said the same thing thirty years ago, aktep. The only reason my he climbed in was that he wanted my sister to have the experience. And she wouldn’t go if dad didn’t.

5

It’s definitely not an adventure for the claustrophobic or acrophobic.

We took my niece up in the Arch when she was about three. She was thrilled when she looked out the windows at the top. “Wow,” she said, “look at all the toy cars.”

6

aktep You just found out what most native St. Louisans already knew. The arch was built to be admired from the outside.

7

If so, then some caring native St. Louisans should be standing outside the Arch with a very large sign that reads “RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.”

8

That sounds like my experience with the Bunker Hill monument in Boston, except add stairs.

Once you get to this itty bitty unventalated room at the top of the stairs you gag. The smell of sweat in an unventalated stone oven at the top of stairs is brutal. Then you climb down the stairs.

At least it’s free.

Did I mention the stairs?

9

This is St. Louis, the city that changes the names of the streets every three blocks and gives directions using the names the streets were changed from. Our motto, “If you figured out how to get here, you can figure out the rest.”

10

You forget to mention that you need to take a few flies into the dryer with you, including a couple of dead ones.

11

College. 1978. Drunk, with the current girlfriend. Two in the Arch-cart.

I had bruises in weird places for days, but THAT is the only way to enjoy the Arch.

12

Tell me about it. 4 interstates all intersect in the same spot and then head off in wildly different directions than from whence they came. And just because you are driving under or next to one of those interstates doesn’t mean you’ll be able to get on it – the entrance ramps are probably two blocks further away. I don’t know how many times I saw a road and said “There’s the highway I want to get on, but how the heck do I get there?”

13

About 10 years ago, I took an extended trip around the west, seeing all manner of things I had never had the chance to before, like the Grand Canyon, camping in the Grand Tetons, seeing Old Faithful, wasting a day going to Mt. Rushmore.

I still remember it like it was yesterday at the Arch. July 5th, 7am. Already pushing 90 degrees, and I swear the humidity was already over 200. Parked quite far away, becasue like others have mentioned here, St. Louis is a nightmare to figure out directionwise.

Walking the parkway along the river, it looked sort of like the pictures recently from New Orelans: half a mile of trash, already stinking, leading up the archway. All left over from the fireworks festivities the night before. Personally I’ve never seen anything else quite like that saunter through the sewage before or since.

Once in line to get in the torture chamber that is the “elevator”, I realize that I am grouped with a German tourist family of four. I’m a big guy, so we all barely fit. Not a pleasant scene: we were all sweaty, they smelled vaguely of some European bazaar, and Granny had the odor of the old wafting off her like she was doused in Eua d’ Funeral Parlor. Longest 4 minutes of my life. I literally thought I would die.

Only good thing: the German daughter was cute, so I got to chat with her (I know a little German). She seemed nice, too bad she was stuck with the rest of the family. She could have made the rest of my trip a bit more interesting!

Sad part: trying to explain the the German family that it is impossible to travel Route 66 from start to finish. Many parts of it don’t exist anymore, at least not in the sense of the original. I tried to show them on a map where the modern equivalents are so they could stay fairly close to the original, but it seemed they had gotten their map from Martin Milner or something. Oddly, Route 66 (original) passes within 2 blocks of my brothers house in Rancho Cucamonga.

Lesson for today: never waste your time in the death trap that is the arch. On the other hand, it is cool to see from the outside.

14

One of the coolest photos I ever took was of the Arch-cart as I was getting ready to get in. With the lighting and high-speed/no-flash setting, it looks just like an alien pod, emanting a weird green glow.

Personally, I thought it was cool (though not worth repeating cool). Ascending the arch was fodder for rich speculation between me and my high school friend Todd. We’d joke about it constantly, but never knew the answer to how to get up and down.

When I had a free day in St. Louis, I had to satiate my curiosity and was glad I did.

15

I’ve only done it once, but I remember thinking that the ride up and down was probably the most fascinating part of the experience. But my heart goes out to anyone claustrophobic who ends up doing that without warning.

Somewhere in my pile of junk, I have some fuzzy, indistinguishable photos that were my attempt to take pictures from the top of the arch out of the windows with a disposable camera. I wonder if I’d recognize them if I found them…

16

June 1970, just 4 short years after completion. It doesn’t sound like anything has changed. Dead flies and all.

17

I don’t remember the light being all that bright.

But it’s one of those things that cool to do once. No need for a repeat.

18

I attended Washington University in St. Louis, and the only time I went up the Arch was when I visited the college with my family the summer before my senior year of high school.

19

My most memorable Arch experience–Riding with a friend from NY who failed to mention before getting on that he was not only claustrophobic, but afraid of heights! :eek:

St. Louis: the only city to build a monument to the people who were smart enough to leave. (Gateway to the West, hehehe)

20

I was born in St. Louis, but went up the Arch only once, and of course it was because relatives were visiting. I hadn’t been taken up it before. I was probably seven, and it scared the bejeebers out of me. I hated that bumpy, clanking, sideways-crabbing elevator.

My cousin says when he went up as a kid, he complained that he couldn’t see his treehouse, because he could see the Arch from the treehouse.