This is the next chapter in an extended review of an October 2023 cruise down the Mississippi with Viking. The overview article can be found here.
We arrived alongside the very low riverbank of the Mississippi in St Louis just as the sun was rising which gave me a chance to capture the Gateway Arch illuminated by the sun:
On the opposite side of the river were scenes of the activity that drives commerce on this great river – filling barges with grain, with the dust illuminated by the rising sun!
We had a coach tour of St Louis and visit to the Gateway Arch National Park organized for the afternoon and so my first thought was to try to get to the Mississippi River Overlook in the Malcolm W Martin Memorial Park over in East St Louis, Illinois. I was pretty sure that I could walk across the river on the historic Eads bridge and it didn’t look very far! The views as I walked through the National Park of both the city and the arch were great:
The pathway onto the bridge turned out to be a little further than the river than I expected, but the walkway had some interesting views back towards the downtown area of the city, including one showing our cruise boat alongside a casino boat that was already pretty popular early in the morning!
I’m not sure just how safe I felt over on the east side of the river – it was pretty quiet and deserted, but nothing untoward occurred! The view of the Mississippi is from a raised platform that you walk up several long pathways to reach. I have to say the view was OK, but nothing special, with wires and various industrial equipment visible on my side of the river.
There was an interesting old dockside railway engine nicely positioned for a view of the train and the arch:
And I was intrigued by the patterns of the shadows of these stairways up the large silo of a grain processing plant by the river:
It had been a long walk to this point and so an Uber back to the city center was a good plan! I was still the only person around at that point!
Unfortunately, the Old Courthouse was being renovated and so a visit was not possible and the lower windows were covered with plastic. I noticed this great reflection of the dome and the office building opposite in the glass windows of a skyscraper. I’m partial to a good reflection! I did write a separate article about how I turned part of this image into a jigsaw puzzle if you are interested!
With a break for lunch, I joined the coach for the afternoon tour which included a visit to the Arch. For some reason, the guide seemed to go out of her way to explain how claustrophobic and crowded it was going to be. I think there was some issue with tickets to the tram ride to the top. The entrance to the museum was very crowded though and I decided (maybe wrongly!) to ditch this tour and take my own walking tour of the city. In retrospect, I should have visited the arch on my own in the morning and ignored the Viking tour – it is a National Park and so my Golden Eagle pass would have got me in at no cost.
However, the walking tour was pretty interesting in its own right:
A little further down the street, another great reflection in a skyscraper!
The shops and restaurants of Ballpark Village were next on my personal tour:
I did a full circuit past the Basilica of St Louis and back into the National Park. With a clear blue sky and perfectly calm water, I found some more interesting reflections – this time of the gateway arch above the lake in the park:
And looking back towards the city as I made my way around the lake towards the river and the waiting boat:
With aching feet, I boarded the boat for a welcome beer! We departed St Louis just as the sun was setting in the early evening and the captain very kindly sailed around the river in front of the city in a circle to allow everyone to get a great view of the skyline of St Louis with a brilliant golden hue in the sky behind the Arch.
With that, it was time for dinner and a full day of sailing before we reached Memphis in Tennessee.
