Elevated Side Quests

Newsletter 2025-10-26

There’s something charming about tourist traps. There are no real victims. The people “falling” for them know what they’re getting into, especially on trips with kids. The main purpose of any family vacation is to run out the clock. You are required by unwritten parenting laws enforced by peer pressure and guilt to spend a set amount of time together. What you do during those hours is irrelevant. You can stare at the wall as long as you do it as a group. Some of my fondest memories growing up were when my brothers and I made up ways to kill time when on the road. Those were also the times we came closest to killing ourselves. Idle hands are the devil’s playground and the fire marshal’s nightmare. My wife Lola and I didn’t have anything scheduled for the final day of our trip to St. Louis. The only item on the agenda was to go home. That would have left far too many hours of daylight unoccupied. To satisfy the parameters of the family vacation, we vowed to take on any and all side quests, much to the chagrin of our kids. As with any adventure, the real goal wasn’t the destination, but the children we traumatized along the way.

We had to get an earlier start on the final day of our vacation than we had on day two. The girls’ main goal after waking up is to put off getting ready for as long as possible. They’re wise beyond their years. On day three, however, we had a hard deadline. We needed to be out of our Airbnb by 11 a.m.. We also needed to clean up a little. Unlike some Airbnbs I’ve booked in the past, where we were required to do laundry, wash the windows, and clean out the gutters, this one only wanted us to take out the trash and get our own stuff off the premises. We managed to leave the place in relatively good condition. We had only been there to sleep. We hadn’t even used the kitchen, eating out for all of our meals, much to the detriment of our health and budget. We were dressed and off the property with an hour to spare. We could have made the four hour drive home right then. That would have been entirely too easy. Quality time means wasting time. We took our first detour.

We drove to Forest Park, which is the biggest green space in St. Louis. It has a zoo, multiple museums, and several other free public attractions. We visited the zoo on day one. On day three, Lola wanted to see the Jewel Box, which is a greenhouse left over from the World’s Fair more than a century ago. Unlike all the other amenities in the city, this one cost a dollar per person, which was basically nothing but was still enough for me to complain about. The greenhouse was just a greenhouse. After about two minutes, we had seen it all. It was mainly a very fancy event space. If we lived in St. Louis, I could see my daughters getting married there, but only if they ignored my financially sound advice to either elope or get married under a tent in a parking lot. If you ever want to plan a wedding for under two hundred bucks, give me a call. I booted up my scavenger hunt app, which had a challenge for the park that included the Jewel Box. The app kept crashing, as it had all along. I was finally able to get it to work on my phone but not on anyone else’s. I read the challenges out loud to them. They reacted as they do anytime our activities depend on the sound of my voice. We were never more than a few seconds away from a riot. We pushed on because we were already in the park and we needed to do something together. We began to roam.

The scavenger hunt took us all over the park. The area was big enough that we had to drive from spot to spot. We checked out a huge outdoor theater, many sculptures, and a random bridge. My favorite bridge was the one that wasn’t there. There was a pavilion isolated in the middle of a pond. Betsy looked it up on her phone. There used to be a pedestrian walkway over the water. Somehow, a car had crashed into it, destroying it completely. That resonated with me since Betsy just got her learner’s permit. Either the bridge crasher was an amateur driver or professional drinker. Even if it was intentional, I don’t know how they would have hit the bridge without a few practice runs and a ramp. The kids’ favorite challenge took us up to the top of a high hill with lots of grass below. After we checked off the scavenger hunt requirements, they ran up and down the hill. There’s nothing quite like a wide open lawn to inspire imagination and make me feel guilty for having a tiny yard full of pigs. After the girls finished playing on the grass, we piled in the van. Waffle rejoiced. We were heading home—eventually.

It took us half an hour to get out of the city. As soon as we cleared urban traffic, Lola and I began hunting for more side quests. One popped up almost immediately. Brown signs pointed towards the Cahokia Mounds just a few miles off the interstate. We decided that was the perfect time to investigate antiquated piles of dirt. Lola and I are history nerds. The kids are just regular nerds. They wanted to go home to the devices they left behind. Those could wait. First we had to experience the exciting world of artificial hills.

After driving through some of the most economically depressed countryside Illinois has to offer, we arrived at the museum. It was closed. The mounds, however, were open. It’s hard to shut down lumps of earth. We learned what we could about the eighty earthworks from the display board outside the museum, then drove to the biggest of the mounds across the street. According to another display, it was built as the religious and political center of a major city in the Mississippian culture. At its peak, around 1100 CE, it had between 10,000 and 20,000 people, making it bigger than London at the time. By 1400 CE, it was completely abandoned for unknown reasons. Based on everything I’ve learned from the History Channel, it was probably aliens. The site was named after the Cahokia tribe, which had nothing to do with the construction of the mounds. They simply moved to the spot hundreds of years later. There’s nothing quite like stealing credit for a group project when you weren’t even in the group. They weren’t the last people to claim somebody else’s work. In the 1700s, French monks took over the hill. In the 1800s, an American farmer built his house on top of it, making him god king of the countryside. Ironically, he’s the only one buried in the giant mound. It would be like if you felt entitled to inter yourself in the Great Pyramids of Giza because no one stopped you from building your house on top of them. That farmer is still there today because no one bothered to dig him up. That’s one way to win king of the hill forever.

There wasn’t a ton of information on the few display boards available. I learned more later from Wikipedia. Most of the mounds don’t have any burials. I can only assume they were built in an ancient version of keeping up with the Jonses. If your neighbor lived on top of an artificial hill, then you had to, too. You couldn’t let them literally look down on you. A few mortuary hills featured mass graves. The people there did not die under happy circumstances. It’s hard to say if it was a ritual sacrifice or just a good old fashioned massacre. Much farther south, one example of Mississippian culture, the Natchez, survived long enough to have contact with European settlers. In that tribe, people volunteered to be sacrificed to accompany important leaders into the afterlife. Going to the next realm is more fun if you take your whole crew. Believe what you want, but if your religious convictions require you to die prematurely for someone else’s benefit, I encourage you to explore other faith options. I prefer to believe that sacrifices/massacres were the exception rather than the rule and that the main motivation for the mounds was neighborly pettiness. It’s the same reason I’m in a never-ending feud with my neighbor across the street. When I say that our dispute over sidewalks is my hill to die on, I don’t mean it literally.

After we went up and down the largest mound, the kids thought we were finally heading home. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Lola discovered that we are just a few miles away from the world’s largest ketchup bottle. Obviously we had to go see it. She hoped it would be in a quaint downtown that would offer local dining options. We drove to the downtown area. Google Maps told us to veer off. We meandered down increasingly sketchy side streets. The tourist trap seemed to be an actual trap. It was the dumbest bait that would only catch the most naive of motorists. We’d be easy pickings for even the laziest highway bandits. Finally, we found the ketchup bottle. It was a painted water tower above an out-of-the-way warehouse. There wasn’t even a spot to stop for photos. We looked at it for all of ten seconds as we drove by. It wasn’t the worst tourist trap experience I’ve had. At least it didn’t cost anything. I give it eight out of ten.

Afterwards, we still needed to eat. We backtracked to the downtown area we had turned away from before. We found a local place that was a fusion of Italian and Greek food. I support any random combination of two culturally dissimilar countries. My holy grail would be a Mexican and Polish fusion. The kids have eaten their fair share of spaghetti, but they’ve never had anything Greek. To their credit, they ordered pasta instead of chicken tenders. I was the uncultured one. I had my pastitsio and dolmades with a side of French fries. We ate entirely too much, which is the main purpose of family vacations after wasting time. Finally, we returned to the road. After many false starts, we were going home for real.

On the drive to St. Louis, we had finished listening to The Hobbit and started The Fellowship of the Ring. On the drive back, we continued with the latter. I only listen to the series when I’m driving with Lola. At the frequency we take vacations, we’ll probably still be listening to it next June. This followed our Lord of the Rings marathon, where we made it through the first two movies. The kids mostly ignored the films and the audiobook. Without taping their eyes and ears open, I don’t know how we’ll ever get them to appreciate it. By being exposed to it in small doses, they’ve developed an immunity. They could see the one ring right in front of them and be completely impervious to its power. We arrived home at 7 p.m. having successfully used up our time for three full days. We accomplished our pointless activities so completely that, the next time we go on vacation, we’ll have to go in a different direction. Other random side quests await.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James