Adventures in Kansas City: A Summary in Pictures

Last year, a friend of mine and I celebrated Spring Break by going to Chicago.  This year, we decided that taking a road trip together was a wonderful tradition, so this year we went to Kansas City!  Kansas City is closer to Omaha than Iowa City, so I drove home the day before and got to spend a little time with my parents the night before we left, which is always a plus!  I then discovered on the way out the door to go pick Sami up that I forgot my debit card at home... In Iowa City.  So we had an hour detour to the bank which started off with "Hey, I need some cash please," and ended with "You qualify for this, this, and this, and we can do this, and I'm going to reverse these fees for you, too!"  So with my financial life all organized and stuff, we set off!

Turns out driving through Missouri is MUCH more interesting than driving across Iowa!  And driving with a friend helps, too!  As I was the wheel-man this year, I don't have any pictures from the drive, but it was exciting to spend some interstate-time looking at hills and stuff for once instead of corn.

Our first stop was Waffle House.  I'd never been there before, and it was a whole lot of food for not a lot of money, which was wonderful!  (We are both college students: the key word this trip was "free!")

From there, we went to the Nelson Atkins Art Museum... which was FREE!  And also huge, and epic.  Observe:

Frederic Edwin Church, Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, 1870

I don't remember what this painting was called or anything, I just wanted the dress!  Like, seriously, can I please get married in this dress?!

Jacob C. Ward, Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1835

"The soul has greater need of the ideal than the real-- it is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live."

I don't know what this was all about, they were just hangin' out in front of the museum!

We stayed with my friend's aunt and uncle, who were very sweet and took great care of us!  We all went to a BBQ joint called Jack Stack's.  It was crazy busy when we got there, and after we were seated and they took our order, it was taking a long time, but we were having a great time chatting and stuff.  Then the manager came to our table and said, "Well, I have good news and bad news.  The bad news, you already know, is that your food is taking way too long.  We had a mix-up in the kitchen, but the good news is that your food will be out soon, and your dinner is on us tonight!"  So all four of us had really yummy food totally for free!

One of our goals for this trip was to see how many of Kansas City's fountains we could take pictures of.  Unfortunately, it was still kind of cold, and so most of the fountains didn't have water in them yet.  So on our way out to our Saturday adventures, we saw this one (pictured below) and said "Oooh, a fountain!  With water in it!  We have to stop and take a picture!"  So we did :)

We then made a stop at WalMart for cheap sandwich-makin's for lunch (a regular WalMart, not a Super WalMart!  Do you have any idea how long it's been since I've been in one of those lil' baby WalMarts?!  That was so sweetly nostalgic!  Anyway...), and then we went to the Kansas City Zoo!  I may have been raised with the Henry Doorly, but this zoo was awesome in its own right!

Sunbathing in fifty degree weather... Clearly, this otter lives in the Midwest!

What were all of their peacocks doing in cages?!

Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?

Happy camel!

While their peacocks may have been in cages, their kangaroos weren't!  We were worried at first when we saw the first two running around loose, but then we found that they weren't fenced in at all, and they had a sign asking us to stay on the path, because the animals were out and about!

I shall call him Squishy, and he shall be mine!  And he shall be my Squishy!

While they maybe didn't have as many different kinds of animals as the Henry Doorly, they had more of the animals that they did have.  For instance, they didn't have three different breeds of lions, they had five or six of the same kind of lion, so they could have a bunch more space and a bunch more friends and they were all happier!  Plus they had happy camels... And free kangaroos.  It was awesome!

From there we went to the Crown Center, where we got lost in an underground parking garage again, because I guess that's a crucial part of our spring break tradition!

We spent the evening wandering around a shopping plaza near my friend's aunt and uncle's place.  We took pictures of the awesome buildings and the fountains (both with and without water), and then we did a lil' shopping!

That night for dinner, we went to a place called Brio.  It was FANTASTIC!!!  I highly recommend it!  It looked super-duper fancy, so when we went in we felt slightly under-dressed, but it wasn't priced any worse than Applebees.  We didn't wait very long for a table, and the waiter spent more time waiting for us to make up our minds and answering our questions than we spent waiting on him.  And on top of the excellent service and agreeable prices, the food was delicioius (as was the Mojito, because it was spring break, so I went a little crazy!)!

I can't believe I ate the whole thing!!!

Then we went back to the house and colored... Because we're college kids who spent an hour in the Crayola store at the Crown Center!  The next morning, we hit up one more mall for a little more shopping where I spent twenty bucks on a shirt, since I only go shopping maybe once a year, so I can go a little crazy, right?

So I can mark another city off of the map, and I enjoyed another trip with an awesome friend!  Who knows where our adventures will take us next year!