Team Egan-Freeman-Schwartzmeyer-&Timms set out this morning to hunt down some Cakeway to the West cakes now scattered across our good city. We didn’t quite reach my goal of 30 cakes, but we still had a good time.

After an extended period of making sure everyone went to the bathroom and then rounding-up a dog that managed to slip out the door as our small army made our way out to our vehicles, our first cake seemed like a great success. This first cake stop was at the Ferguson Station Depot and this cake was painted by Dennis Babbitt.

After that we found the cake in UMSL’s Mercantile Library. Upon our approaching the cake, the first words out the securities guard’s mouth were, “No touching please. You can’t touch or climb on it.” The mood instantly became a bit more somber.

I can’t say I blame the security guard because little hands seemed drawn to the delicate pieces like a moth to fire.

There is a lot of interesting things in the Mercantile Library and the kids photographed just about every square inch of the place. I’m sure students trying to study appreciated us, but we had fun at the expense of their education.

UMSL has a second cake in front to the Athletic Center.

This cake is my favorite so far.

Lots of interesting things on this cake.

After stopping for lunch we decided to visit Turtle Park. Notice that nobody is respecting my cheesy photography props at this point. Goofy hats and noise-makers cannot compete with swings,

things to climb on,

and massive turtles.

We thought we could get a few good pictures of the little guys, but asking a toddler to sit still for photos while there is climbing to be done is unreasonable.

Here we thought it would be fun to make it look like the snake was eating the baby, but really it’s just strange.

Oh yeah, here’s the cake painted by Liza Fishbone.

Sidenote: I must say that we did find the barefoot sunbather playing everyone’s favorite hits from the 80s right at the entrance of the children’s’ park interesting.

Our last cake find at the Jewel Box (painted by Andy Cross) doesn’t seem to have garnered the excitement it might have gotten had we not just come from Turtle Park.

The kids were done with the hats and noise-makers by now and they seemed to have lost the ability to focus long enough for a group photo. That was our tip-off to wrap up the day.

It was a good time with my ladies!