My Mom and I headed to St Charles, Missouri today with a group of people from her church. It's a nice little town, and I'm glad we went, but here's some advice to those of you who might be going there soon.
Pace yourselves. Don't plan on spending more than a few hours there, or you'll be looking around for more stuff to do.
A lot of the stores are exactly alike. They sell the same things, for pretty much the same prices. If you see something you like (that's not in many of the stores) and don't buy it, write down which store you saw it at, because otherwise you'll never find it again.
If you feel like dying young, have the potato soup at Magpie's restaurant.
Don't take strollers, or wheelchairs for that matter. Not much is handicap accessible. Most of the stores have big steps up into them, and some even have signs saying "no strollers". As a matter of fact, you should probably leave your kids at home. Everything is very crowded, and there's a lot of temptation for little fingers.
Don't wear a backpack. I did, and everywhere I went I felt like 1. people thought I was stealing and 2. that I was about to knock something over. When I say that the stores are crowded, that's an understatement. And it's not crowded with people (although that was somewhat of an issue today) but they're mostly just crowded with stuff for sale.
Pace yourselves. Really. I mean it. Our group was there for almost 5 hours, and that was a bit much. Most people headed back to the bus early. We didn't go in all of the shops, there were a lot of duplicates (see note 2).
All in all, we had a decent time, and I'm happy to say that I've been there if someone asks, but it's probably not a place I'd go back to voluntarily. Most of the stuff was priced high, and well, after you've seen one of those shops you've probably seen most all of them.
Later :)
Posted by tomiandc at November 12, 2005 10:19 PM