My dear friends took me to St. Charles about a decade ago when I was visiting St. Louis. I fell in love with the cobblestone, the lamp posts, the beautifully painted buildings, the beautiful park on the banks of the Missouri River! St. Charles is magical, especially on rainy summer afternoons.
A few years ago, Josh had flight training in St. Louis for a week and I tagged along just so I could get a chocolate chip cookie from “Grandma’s Cookies” again (seriously, you need to get a dozen of these cookies, they make them with ice-cream scoops!).
It was a wonderful 5 days of reading on quiet benches (with a fresh supply cookies), exploring the quaint shops, and writing.
So if you ever find yourself near St. Louis, here’s your guide to the perfect afternoon:
1. Grab coffee at “Picasso’s Coffee House“
This coffee shop has a quirky, vintage feel to it and is the perfect spot to work on your next best-selling novel. I spent several mornings on their patio sipping coffee and watching people go by.
2. Spend the next few hours exploring “Main Street Books”
Honestly. This is one of my favorite bookstores. You couldn’t ask for a cozier vibe, winding your way through the beautiful book displays, coffee in hand, raindrops tapping on the grand old windows. The upstairs is darling too–so darling that I felt the need to take a selfie to document it.
3. Shop!
First things first, be sure to grab a cookie (or two) at “Grandma’s Cookies.” My dear friend shipped me about a dozen of these a few weeks ago because I’m obsessed, LOL.
There are so many fun shops to explore. Antique shops, boutiques, restaurants…you could easily spend hours there.
St. Charles makes me nostalgic…
For the time my girlfriends and I got dolled up and spent the afternoon drinking coffee and taking pictures, and just enjoying being young, relatively carefree twenty-somethings, haha.
And for the time I went down there with my parents for my friend’s wedding and got stuck shopping in a thunderstorm.
And for the time I went there with Josh when we were newlyweds–one of our first trips together after our honeymoon.
It is exactly zero degrees outside today and cloudy. I would love to be reading on a sunny bench watching the river roll by. If it is currently freezing and miserable where you live too, I hope this post brings some summer sunshine to your day!
Thanks for reading!
Are there any must-see shops in St. Charles that I missed? Let me know in the comments!
Leave a Reply