Three of us decided to turn down a party invitation to stay in last night and work on our knitting projects. Suzanne and I are both behind our desired schedule for our Knitting Olympics projects, and Chickona is working on her first sweater.

Much to our surprise, at 8:30, our friends called. Please come to the party, they said. There’s food — and you’ll love the location. You’ll be disappointed if you miss the City Museum, they claimed.

We grumbled. We groaned. But eventually we gave in and agreed to come join them.

And thank goodness we did.

The St. Louis City Museum is awesome. It’s like a children’s museum, but aimed at everyone. So there are quirky things like an architectural hallway with pieces of St. Louis buildings (including a surprising number of doorknobs). And there’s an arts and crafts corner. But there are also slides all over the place. And areas where you can climb through and up and across the building. There’s an aquarium with petting tanks. (Turtles are surprisingly cold to the touch, even when one remembers they are cold-blooded.) There’s a section of caves. There’s a whole outside component (which we did not take advantage of in the balmy teens).

So after a trip where the biggest (nay, only) crowd we saw was when the SuperCross was letting out and where abandoned buildings outnumbered those in-use, it was a huge relief to discover that there was life in St. Louis after all and that people were putting old buildings (in this case, an old shoe factory) to new and creative uses.

St. Louis had been disappointing; the City Museum salvaged my impression of it. And in the process, it vaulted to the head of the line in terms of my best museum experiences.