So often, landmarks fall dreadfully short of our expectations. Anybody who's ever been to the Statue of Liberty knows what I mean. Whenever you see her on TV, Lady Liberty is portrayed as huge, standing tall over New York harbor, greeting all who come to this land from miles away. In reality, and by comparison, she is disappointingly, almost embarrassingly small, tucked into a little corner near New Jersey where you really have to go out of your way to see her. The Empire State Building is never as tall as you imagine. The Hollywood sign can only be appreciated without binoculars from very specific areas of the city. Even Mount Rushmore, I was told, looks much tinier than one would expect.

I always imagined the St. Louis Arch would fall into this same category. The only pictures I could ever remember seeing with the Arch were collages in which the Arch's image was pasted over the St. Louis skyline, standing tall and prominent. In reality, I always assumed that it was probably just this little fifty-foot cement sculpture buried in some square in the middle of the city. Instead, it would prove to be the first of many pleasant surprises on this trip, where reality vastly exceeded expectations.

Approaching St. Louis from the Illinois side of the Mississippi River the night before, I was able to see the skyline lit up in the distance. As I looked, I noticed a thin sliver of light out in front. I said to Lauren, "Hey, there's the Arch." Even from a good twenty miles away, it was obvious that the Arch was huge. The fact that we could see it from that far away at night spoke volumes. As we got closer, it became apparent that the Arch (lit up purple at night) was bigger than any of the buildings making up the St. Louis skyline. What I'd always assumed to be a tiny concrete structure hidden from view was in fact a 600-foot stainless steel beauty right out in front of the city on the banks of the Mississippi River.

The next morning, Lauren and I took picture after picture from every conceivable angle. The Arch's angular shape and reflective properties made for some interesting plays with light and dark. It would be hard for even the world's worst photographer to take a bad picture of the Arch. It's sheer size made it impossible to capture the whole thing in one picture, though Lauren and I sure tried. I even walked right to the river's edge, laid down on my back and zoomed the camera all the way out… and I still couldn't get the entire gaping mouth into one picture. Then I lowered the camera looking just with my eyes and realized that even with my own natural field of sight it was impossible to see the whole Arch at once. One of the sides was always just beyond my peripheral vision, and I had to make a decision between looking at the top or bottom because it was impossible to see both at once.

St. Louis is known as "the Gateway to the West" and the Arch's official name is "The Gateway Arch." This is where Lewis and Clark began their legendary journey in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, thus putting America's settlement of the west in full swing. The Arch is part of the Jefferson Expansion National Memorial. Underground, beneath the Arch lies the Museum of Westward Expansion, a football-field-sized tribute to America's conquering of the western frontier.

We had left the hotel around ten o'clock in the morning. After nothing but oatmeal in the morning for five straight days, we were ready for a real breakfast, and being in the Midwest I knew you couldn't swing a dead polecat without hitting a Waffle House. We figured somewhere in the 30 miles between the hotel and the city, there would have to be a Waffle House or an IHOP or some kind of breakfast place off the interstate. Well… there wasn't. So Lauren and I just kind looked at each other and shrugged saying, "Oh well, guess we'll eat after."

Man I wish we had eaten before. The museum was absolutely fascinating, but our stomachs and blood sugars were yelling at us to cut it short. There's a tram that you can ride to the top of the Arch, which Lauren had wanted to take, but the line to get tickets was as insanely long as the line for the tram itself. Instead, we opted to spend about an hour reading a timeline history of American settlement. One thing that I found interesting was the way the museum phrased their little historical snippets. Somebody who had turned their brain off wouldn't realize just how badly we screwed over the Indians. For instance, one blurb would say that in such and such a year, "Seminole Indians ceded Florida to America." We all know that the rest of that sentence should probably read, "…under the threat of extermination." Elsewhere it would say, "Cherokee Indians are given a patch of land west of the Mississippi." The museum left out the part that explains how that patch of land was probably a swath of barren desert. One thing I would have liked the museum to include was an exhibit explaining the dark side of the Westward Expansion. I know it was good and important for this country, but at least acknowledge and pay respect to the people who caught the raw end of it all.

Then again, for all I know, maybe they did have an exhibit like that, but Lauren and I were both ready to pass out from hunger and had to go find food. But first, I just couldn't leave St. Louis without getting a shotglass with the Arch on it. The museum gift shop didn't have any, so we walked to a nearby hotel and found what we were looking for in their shop. On the way out, one of the hotel employees noticed Lauren looking a little anemic and gave her an entire pack of Lifesavers®. We hopped back on the interstate and got off about ten miles later, pulling into the first Waffle House we came across. After five-days-worth of oatmeal, I must say bacon, eggs and waffles are just so incredibly delicious. We caught up on our postcard and journal writing and got our arteries sufficiently good and clogged before getting back on the road re-energized.