The plan was to visit Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, MO next. Since this National Park is in the middle of downtown St. Louis, we made reservations to stay at a State Park about 70 miles away. We were pretty anxious about this day because we would need to find a place downtown to park the camper and run the generator so the dogs would have A/C. Searching online for parking lots that could safely accommodate this did not do much to ease my anxiety.
We made it downtown with the Arch in sight and tried finding a place to park. Our most promising lot was along the Mississippi – however, construction was not our friend, and there was not an obvious way to get through. So now we’re off the “map” and end up down a side street going under a bridge. The clearance was 8’3″ and we had no idea what the camper’s was…Spoiler Alert…it’s 10’5″. Thankfully an incredulous bystander shouted at us to stop! Now we had to back out of this tight spot side street as other drivers continued to come up behind us. A very nice local man stopped his own truck and helped us make it out. He was directing traffic, offering directions and encouragement to Dave, and just being amazing. It was such a relief to be driving away from that bridge!
We decided we’d had enough of downtown St. Louis with our camper in tow, so we hopped back on I-44 and made our way to Meramec State Park. We arrived and set up camp on site #117 around 5:00 p.m. It was a pull-through site with a wooded area then a river behind us. It was a beautiful campground with many trails and caves in the area to explore. We were exhausted that night, but in the morning we scheduled a tour of Fisher Cave and took a short hike. The trail, Walking Fern Trail, was only a 0.5 mile loop but the terrain was rocky and not super-well traveled. The trail led us right over Fisher Cave and took us to another, shallow cave called Indian Cave. Very cool scenery.
I loved the tour of Fisher Cave, it was led by a ranger and just over an hour in length. The ranger had so much information to share and we got to see so many cool things. Later on our trip we visited Carlsbad Caverns National Park, and while the caves and caverns were much more spectacular, I really appreciated the guided experience we had here in Fisher Cave. I would definitely recommend a trip to this area, there were many signs to more touristy cave attractions as well.
As for Gateway Arch, we’d still like to visit this National Park at some point. We thought we might make a long weekend of it sometime and just get a hotel room to stay in the area.
