Dates:
April 26 to
May 1, 2021
Mileage:
11,884
Location:
KOA St Louis West / Route 66
St Louis MO
In keeping with our planning, this park was a resort KOA where we laid over for a week to let our mail catch up. I had thought we might have a Supervisor’s Toolkit, I knew I had a presentation with Ernest Hunter for TAPPA, and I wanted to be close to fast internet.
Official Picture 
This was really a well run KOA, and we had a deluxe site. The dogs got a pretty good place to play, although it was a little far. As we saw later when we went to the Bridal Cave, all the places here have these sluice chutes where the young folks can “pan for gold” like the miners. Inside, there are bags of earth you can buy and take to the water chute, where you wash away the dirt, leaving precious stones.
As always when you are on or close to the “Mother Road,” everything is themed for Route 66. This office at the first state park we found was closed due to Covid 19.
We weren’t ready to deliver a Toolkit but I did have the TAPPA presentation, and we scored a nice spot at the KOA, although it was close to the tracks and there were lot of trains. The first order of business was to go out to dinner with Connie Carrillo, and we went to Katie’s Pizza and Pasta. It’s quite the place, and not your ordinary pizza joint.
As it turned out, about two hours before the TAPPA presentation, the radar showed heavy thunderstorms, so ElizaBeth and I got a motel room at a Holiday Inn just across from Six Flags.
We always eat our way through town.
Eureka was just down from Pacific, and the train traffic was phenomenal. U. S. Silica still has a mine, and these silica mining caves in Pacific were exposed to the outside world in 1932 when the sandstone bluffs were excavated for the widening of Route 66. We did not learn until later when we read it on RoadsideAmerica.com, the adjacent Serenity Park was originally intended as a memorial garden for deceased children, but it now includes a memorial for fallen military personnel. We didn’t know to look the small, rather odd, statuettes of kids nestled up high into one of the cut-out, this picture is from their website.
Speaking of many trains, we learned something. The town of Pacific started as Franklin and then changed its name to City of Pacific because of the Atlantic Pacific railway line. This is from the Union Pacific website:
More than 150 years ago, Union Pacific Railroad began building west from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, opening a grand frontier to immigrants who settled in existing communities or started new ones along the rail lines.
That bond between our railroad and early settlements has strengthened and grown. Today, Union Pacific serves nearly 7,300 communities where we live, our children grow up, and in which we recruit employees. From rural town to metropolis, we’re honored to have unique, long-standing community relationships.
To date, Union Pacific has recognized 131 communities as “Train Town USA.”
https://www.up.com/aboutup/train_town/index.cfm
