I did a very quick road trip to Kansas City over the weekend, which when all was said and done, consisted of 1400 miles of driving within three days on not much sleep, lots of food which was completely unhealthy, a wedding, and an over all fun time. My friend Garrett and myself headed out to KC on Friday, and got back very early Monday morning.
Friday it took a bit for us to get going. I wasn’t even able to get onto a major highway before my iPod started freaking-out, and so we had to make the trip virtually musicless (talk about a soul killer… ). 
I suspect the disk is corrupted somehow, but I haven’t been quite motivated to spend some time on fixing it yet. Hopefully I won’t have to send it to Apple.. argh. After many boring hours of driving and much cleaning of the windshield because of bugs, we arrived in KC at about 12:30 AM local time early Saturday morning.
On Saturday morning we woke-up at a pretty reasonable hour and headed over to our friends house for a pre-wedding breakfast with friends, and then went back downtown where our hotel was at to check out the few Kansas City sights including the Liberty Memorial and Union Station to burn some time until the 5:30 PM wedding. Downtown KC actually reminds me a lot of Downtown Denver in the 80’s before all of the redevelopment happened. Seems like it has a lot of potential, but no one really seems to live downtown, and there are a lot of cool abandoned buildings. From a quick tour of a few things downtown, we headed to the wedding and essentially spent the evening at the reception. I did end-up downloading some music to the laptop before heading to bed just in case we came across some CD blanks somewhere to have music for the car.
Sunday we slept in a bit and grabbed some amazing BBQ at Arthur Bryant’s on the way out of town once it had opened. The sandwich in the picture with this entry is my meal– a combination pork and beef sandwich which contained 6 slices of Wonder Bread, a lb of meat, some heavily larded french fries, pickles, and a large Coke, and this is pretty much the standard meal for the place. I was able to get down all of the sandwich sans about 3 pieces of bread and maybe one third of the fries.
During a fuel stop we stumbled across some CD-R’s, so I had Garrett burn me few CD’s while back on the road. I was actually surprised the laptop would burn CD’s in a moving car while on battery power for some reason, but I guess I’m just a geek that way. We finally got into Denver at around 10:30 PM. Unfortunately I still had to take Garrett home to Ft. Collins and also pick-up my dog, and as luck would have it, there was a crazy traffic jam in North Denver for some construction that took forever to get through. I finally got back home at around 1:30 AM, and that’s pretty much it I guess.
I think my photos from the trip tell the story a little better, but mostly it was just a quick but busy road trip to attend a friends’ wedding. Oh, and thanks yet again to Valentine One for keeping me from getting any speeding tickets while making Kansas blur by *knock on wood*.
I’m glad to see you had a good time in KC. We have over 100 BBQ restaurants, if you liked Arthur Bryant’s, come back and try a few more local legends.
FYI, there has been a big growth spurt of construction in the downtown area. Old buildings are being converted to lofts, a new 18,000 seat arena is under construction with shopping and entertainment next door. H&R Block has built a new headquarters and the IRS is consolidating a number of regional centers into a massive new facility.
Ryan,
Yeah, it reminded me a lot of downtown Denver before it started being repopulated in the late 80’s/early 90’s. Definately jump on it now if you want to get in “on the cheap” if it makes the kind of resurgance that Denver has. It’s a completely different place now.