Missouri Vacation: Days 4-7

[For some reason or another, I kept putting this off... but I figured I that shouldn't leave my blogged self staying in Maryville forever!]

Day 4: After packing up our things in the Maryville hotel, we were off again! I had been doing all the driving in Maryville, since I should start to get used to it, so I took us out of town towards Kansas City. After an attempted-but-failed pit stop in St Josephs and then an actual pit stop at a random truck stop, we arrived safely in Kansas City. (Now, here's a description I use to compare Kansas City to the Twin Cities. Imagine a bunch of grapes. Each grape is like a city in the Twin Cities metro: some are bigger than others, but each one is like its own compact town in terms of size. Now, take a handful of those grapes and randomly scatter them across a piece of paper. A grape is a suburb of Kansas City, while all the bits of paper without a grape immediately sitting on it is Kansas City, as in there are suburbs of Kansas City completely surrounded by Kansas City. Just take a look at this - the red blob on the left is strictly Kansas City, which apparently stretches across four counties. I just figured there would be smaller suburbs growing into larger suburbs and then Kansas City... well, to each his/her own...)

The hotel we stayed at was in the Plaza, which is an area of the city filled with really fun architecture that was a distance from downtown, but still felt quite populated. There's a huge fountain in the area by our hotel that we got to see several times, including the times it was being used as a bathtub (in the defense of the homeless, it was still very hot). We arrived at the Plaza before we could check into our hotel, so we roamed the area. There was a really nice upscale cafe/bistro that we went to lunch and ended up sitting between a blind woman and her seeing-eye dog and two men where one was obviously interviewing the other much younger man for a position in his biomedical technology company (not that I was listening in or anything... no really, the older man was like 2' from me with a distictive voice tonality!). We had picked up a map of the Plaza and we saw a movie theater so we decided to pop by and see what was playing. As it turned out, the entire building was in a power outage, so we got a free voucher for there and because the box office was pitch black, no idea about what movies were showing.

After some additional shopping and walking around in the warm weather, it was time for us to check into the hotel. (We were already able to park our car in the hotel's underground parking facility, so at least we didn't have to get our car from some distant location.) Our hotel was one of like ten in the city that was hosting students from across the country for some leadership conference, so we saw many people/cars/signs with Arkansas emblems, razorbacks, etc. After settling in our hotel room and getting a call from Grandpa (which, among other things, included him telling us to turn on the TV which had just reported that Michael Jackson died), we left again for dinner. All the people we talked to at the Academy and various other people we told about the trip told us the same thing: when in Kansas City, you have to have the BBQ there. I think every single person recommended a different place, but we ended up going to Jack Stack BBQ, which was also in the Plaza area (and reminded me of BHS). Oh my gosh, it was amazing! It was quite crowded, but we were cool sitting in the bar area, where we ended up with a booth with a personal TV (which had the NBA draft going on while the jumbotron behind me was on some news network going over all things Michael Jackson). The servers were great and the food was fast and delicious! Mmm...

After dinner, we wanted to explore more, especially since it had cooled off more. The Plaza is right by the river (of the Kansas variety, I believe) and we even saw a gondola on the river, so we thought it would be fun to walk on the concrete shore, as is the case with rivers in the middle of cities. Well, after walking down half the stairs to the river, we discovered it was way too warm down there without any wind and the water appeared to have a less-than-appealing brown tint. Oh, how I love the clearer waters of Minnesota... Anyway, we walked around town, heard a band who set up shop on a street corner, went to a Cold Stone for dessert and then relaxed in our room for the rest of the night. (There was a outdoor pool just for the hotel, but it was full of Arkansas people.)


Day 5: Oh, the joys of more triple-digit heat. First off, since our hotel offered it, we had room service breakfast, which was a lot of food (at least for the egg combos - there were a lot of ala carte items that would add up to a good breakfast too)! Then, we went and visited the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art which was right across the street from the hotel. It was really cool to engage in an intellectual conversation about some rather abstract pieces with my mother (she did get an art teacher's degree in college). One room was filled with small strips of stained fabric (like little catterpillars) that covered the entire color spectrum as you walked around the room - making sure not to step on any of course! (It was Polly Apfelbaum's "Split".) After that, we went over to the movie theater, hoping that the power had been restored so we could find out which movies were showing when. (Oh, we had found the theater's website the night before and saw that they were showing Angels & Demons, among other things. Mom has read both DVC and A&C but hadn't seen this movie yet.) As it turns out, the power was back on, and after waiting, we found out we were like a half hour late for Angels & Demons, so we decided to see Away We Go. Since I still had my voucher from the day before, I got in for free and the theater was set up such that the first showing of any movie was $4 (an odd equivalant of the matinee price drop since some shows only showed 3 or 4 times at night... but the first one at 5:30pm would have been $4)... so we got to see a movie for $2 each, which is a pretty sweet deal if you ask me.

The movie had that independent movie feel and some really funny moments (like the scene in Madison with the stroller). Since Mom wanted to see Angels & Demons and it since it was another very hot day, we decided to get lunch at the nearby Panera and come back and see another movie! Not a rip-roaring adventure with thrills, chills, and spills, but we were still making our vacation a break from the ordinary. The Panera was filled with SkillsUSA students (that's the name of the conference that was using our hotel along with many others), and to be blunt, there were a lot of attractive women my age there. I know that's a random thing to say, but it was a random thought I had when I was there. So, we had lunch (I had this really good chipotle chicken sandwich) and then it was back to the movie theater. Angels & Demons was playing in the other part of the building which was on the next street connected by skyway. Unfortunately, the A/C wasn't as good there so maps were used as fans. As for the movie, I haven't read any of Dan Brown's stuff, but I thought it was a pretty good adventure movie, when it recognize that it's a work of fiction. You know, if people have recommendations for adventure/detective movies, let me hear them!

After the movie, we bolted back to the hotel, caught our breath and then went to the jazz club nearby (we had made a reservation that morning but we weren't sure how crowded it would be - fortunately, it was basically a block from the hotel). I forget the name of the place, but it was also a really cool experience. It was a four-person combo (saxophone(s), bass, drums, and piano) playing and at the end, there was a woman who came up and sang some songs with them. It was a really small space, but we got a nice spot towards a side not too close or far back. We also had dinner. All in all, a really fun experience. Mom was saying that she would do stuff like this every night if she lived in Kansas City. To me, it felt very authentic, which is something I love to experience when I'm on vacation (yeah, I don't like the "watch the scenary from out of a bus for 5 days" type of vacation). After that we called it a night.


Day 6: Perhaps... okay, it was the most boring day of the vacation. The plan of the day was to check out of the hotel, drive from Kansas City, MO to St Cloud, MN and not get too bored (okay, it was moreso added in retrospect). One perk was that in our attempt to get onto I35 from the hotel, we got to drive by the main Kansas City art museum which has outside exhibits, like the infamous Kansas City shuttlecock... well, there are like three or four, but they are scattered around (I hate to compare various parts of Kansas City to the Twin Cities, but for all you Twin Cities people, KC's shuttlecocks are like St Paul's [and thus the Twin Cities'] cherry and spoon). There was also a Shakespeare festival near there, but it looked like things were still being set up, so we didn't see much driving by. Since we had taken the less-traveled road the way down, we took I35 the whole way up in an attempt to be on the road for less time. It was rather uneventful and by that, I mean quite uneventful. The interstate takes some turns to go through Des Moines (it at least looks that way on a map) but it didn't look like we were even going through a town when that happened. After a long day of driving, we arrived in St Cloud. It was a very l0w-key night then: grabbed some Leeann Chin's, crashed at my sister's, talked with them some when they got home and then turned in.


Day 7: That day wasn't vacation, but kind of was at the same time. My grandmother was celebrating her 80th birthday so a large chunk of my dad's family went to Park Rapids to spend an afternoon with her. There ended up being 40-50 people there, which included almost all of my grandmother's children (my aunts & uncles) but nowhere near all my cousins and their families. (Generation-wise, I'm one of the youngest in our family tree, so many of my cousins are having two, three, four kids of their own already.) It was nice to talk with people who I hadn't seen for a long time, and I found myself talking about the Missouri job a good number of times. I think people were impressed since I was able to find a job and happy that I found something that I like doing. Oh, and since it's a family reunion on my dad's side, I got to hold a baby for a while (first cousin, once removed). A couple of cousins and I had a game of croquet that spanned the entire backyard, while some of my uncles, older cousins, and their kids played some variant of horseshoes, apparently. It was a good way to wrap up the expedition to Missouri. Good times.