In an unexpected turn of events, St. Charles, MO turned out to be one of our favorite stops on the trip. What began as a convenience stop to get us halfway between Kitty Hawk and Durango worked out to be a surprisingly great week of Winnie’s Big Trip! Located 25 minutes from Missouri’s capital city of St. Louis, St. Charles is an adorable, historic town that sits along the banks of the Missouri River. Between cobblestone streets and old, colonial-style buildings, exploring downtown St. Charles was one of the highlights of our week.

Objectively, the biggest highlight of the week was celebrating Ellie’s 29th birthday. Per our (two year old) tradition, the day started out with Daniel “surprising” Ellie with bagels first thing in the morning. Tradition dictactes that Ellie gets to eat the bagel tops - BTs colloquially - of both bagels so she does not have to decide between her two all-time favorites: asiago and onion. Later that evening, we celebrated at a place called Chicken N’ Pickle, a restaurant/entertainment complex with pickleball courts, ping pong tables, cornhole, life-size Connect4, and much more! Alhough our (most Ellie’s) pickleball skills were somewhat subpar, we had tons of fun and really enjoyed ourselves.

Despite loving this stop for the most part, our Airbnb was a bit of a detractor. Good internet connection eluded us once more and Ellie had to spend most of the week working at a coworking space. The shower was also a disappointment with a pretty dismal supply of hot water.

In less dismal news though, another highlight of the week was taking a trip to Gateaway Arch National Park (did you know the St. Louis Arch was a National Park?!). We got to take a ride up to the top in pod-like elevator that can only be described as a claustrophic’s worst nightmare. As non-claustrophobics, however, we enjoyed the ride up and got to know our two pod-mates who may have been punking us with their age (Daniel and Ellie both assumed they were in college only to find out they were in their mid-thirties with multiple children).

One of our final acts in St. Charles was an obligatory stop to a local dessert shop called Grandma’s Cookies. In a confounding act of generosity, one of the employees gave us four massive cookies for free. We cannot emphasize enough just how dumbfounded we were by this. Once again, we were not ruling out the possibling of a punking, but as it turns out, this employee was just gifting us four cookies as a kind gesture when she saw us being indecsive about which cookies to get. Daniel thinks she had a crush on him. Ellie disagrees.

All in all, St. Charles was a fantastic stop on our trip and nice surprise given we hadn’t previously thought of the St. Louis metropolitan area as a must-see destination.

• How likely we are to visit again: 7/10. We loved St. Charles but would probably only return if we were tacking it onto another trip in the mid-West
• How likely we would be to live here: 7/10. We could definitely see ourselves living in St. Charles. The only drawback is the lack of friends/family in the area