We took a quick little trip to Kansas City this last weekend. Katsu has spent the last couple months working like a maniac on grants. Just when I finished my PhD and stopped working at nights, Katsu has been staying up to 12 or later almost every night. One night, he worked his full 8+ hour work day and then worked again from 8p-4a at home on his grants. Insane. Anyways, we needed to get out of town for a bit and we can’t afford much more than a weekend road trip.
Plus, it has been HOT here (and the whole rest of the country I know), but seriously, we are starting our second week on a excessive heat advisory because everyday our heat index is 105-115. And seeing that our actual temperature almost never hits 100, the humidity is BAD. Very bad. Very bad for pregnant lazy me who is already tired always. We basically have been house hermits. So, while we stayed indoors as much as possible on our trip (it’s hot in Kansas City, too), it was nice to have a change of scenery.
To the trip:
The kids woke up early, so we were on the road by about 7:40 am and drove pretty much straight through to Independence. We stopped and ate at Gates BBQ, KC is well known for BBQ. The food was very good – I liked it much better than the last bbq place I went to in Texas. The meat was much less sauced, less sweet, and less fatty. The kids weren’t too impressed with the food (the sausage especially was too spicy), but liked the fries and ate some of the sandwiches. The main problem was the dining area did not appear to be airconditioned and it was HOT. I was starting to go a little crazy at the end.
Then, we went to Truman’s Presidential Museum. I did not know much about Truman before visiting the museum, and like all the presidential museums I have been to, I really liked it. Truman really seemed like a guy who just feel into being the president (the president FDR died, so he as vice president became president; but seriously, he had only met with the president 2 times before the president died!). And he had hard decisions to make – bombing of Hiroshima, how to end and ease out of WWII without killing the economy, the cold war, lots of stuff. He had a ton of great ideas, which unfortunately didn’t all get implemented. He even wanted national health care as part of the end of WWII Fair Deal. Too bad that didn’t go through. Anyways, we loved the museum. The kids did really well. There were lots of headsets where you could listen to people from the time talking about the time period or speeches or stuff like that. The kids loved it. The downstairs also had more kid-oriented activities like making campaign buttons. It was a lot of fun.
Next, we went to the Community of Christ temple. They were having an organ recital at 3:30 that we thought might be nice. We toured the temple first (way smaller than I remember as a kid), and then were the only guests for the organ recital. The organist talked to us for awhile and then played away. The organ is very nice and definitely the most impressive part of the temple. Afterwards, she let the boys come up and see how the organ works and all the different stops and pedals and registers. The boys were pretty fascinated with it. Then, we took a few quick pictures outside in the blazing heat.
Next, we went to see the temple lot. Pretty small and anticlimatic, but I had read online that if you go the Church of Christ (temple lot), you can see the original corner stones, so we went in for the tour. Kudos to this church for having toys for kids to play with while we got the whole spiel. There was already a couple there before us, and I think the tour guide person was kind of antagonistic to them, because he kept saying “Well, if you read in the Bible and Book of Mormon, you will see that this is really true …”. I actually thought this church was WAY more consistent than the Community of Christ. But pretty much, they are a pretty tiny church with the main claim to fame that they own the temple lot and the cornerstones.
Then, we finally went to our church’s visitor center. I really liked the displays at the top – the kids loved the videos you could select and watch from the Book of Mormon – and I had never seen them either. I thought they were well done. Downstairs, though, we had to take a guided tour, typical to most church history sites – talk a bit and watch a little video, “How did that make you feel”, awkward pause, continue to the next station. The kids were loud and didn’t want to sit still and honestly, I only heard about half of it. I was really surprised about the lack of history that they told about the church members in Independence (granted they were only there for like 2 years) and also how much they downplayed the physical concept of Zion (especially considering that at least as I understand it, this site is supposed to be Zion and the New Jerusalem). But thankfully, they had a really area for the kids to play at the end – hooray! And they had a “good” brochure to show were all the other church sites were.
The boys both fell asleep in the car, even though it was like 5:30 pm, sigh. We found a Little Ceasars for pizza for our movie night (after quite a bit of being lost) and then headed to Liberty where our hotel was. I found the best hotel and we even had a gift card we got for using our credit card during Christmas for a hotel that helped defray part of the cost. It had an indoor water park. A small one, but still WAY better than an outdoor pool and better than an indoor pool. It had one slide that only Katsu could go on – boy it went fast – I was afraid he would fly out and he splashed water everywhere when he went down. But there was a little kid slide and also things that were spraying water everywhere (the kids actually weren’t too fond of that). That area was only 1 foot deep – hooray! And the rest was only 3 foot deep, so it was really easy to watch the boys in. And the décor was cute. The water was a little cold (Seth’s lips kept turning blue), but the boys loved it and we went swimming on each of the 3 days. The room was nice, too. We had a king bed with a foldout couch and the boys slept on that and it worked really well. It was really nice, classy décor. And the shower, wow – instead of Miami which just had a swinging door, this shower had NO door. Seriously, it just kind of turned a corner and that was it. But, it was really nice. Better than the cheapest-hotel-we-could-find that we usually stay in. It was a fun, but hot day.
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