Day 6 – KS and MO

Woke up in Lawrence and made the drive out to KCMO so that we can get some famous KS BBQ! But before we let our hungry selves pig out, we checked out what was supposedly North America's 2nd largest train station: Union Station and the WWI memorial right across the street. The train station was pretty impressive and had an awesome model train exhibit! :) and well the WWI memorial was kinda depressing but we got views of KS and all of its greenery from the top of the tower there.

Now.. the BBQ: it was tasty! :) We hit the joint (Arthur Bryant's) right around lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon. But the wait was good, b/c there were so many BBQ items on the menu that we didn't know what to get and everything looked too good! We ended up getting ribs and chicken with sides of potato salad and baked beans! MMMMMM! There were 3 different BBQ sauces for you to try out as well. And before we left KCMO, we checked out the farmers mkt on the ethnic side of town and picked up a KS? MO? watermelon from Farmer John's wife. Personal sized for Alex and Rebecca. Then off we went to Independence!

Independence was apparently the place to be in 1850- scandalous rich people and the beginnings of the Oregon Trail. We toured the Bingham-Wagoner estate because no one was at the lengthy trail museum. Although the old southern tour guide and the wedding arrangements going on at the house made it seem like a very amateur tour, it was by far the coolest we’d been on. Not only was nothing cordoned off, but the tour-guide encouraged us to manhandle just about every possession and heirloom we saw. Rebecca had to refrain from stealing the coolest dollhouse ever known to Kansas. On top of that, the tour-guide cared only about gossiping about risqué artifacts. After seeing an open field that apparently had original wagon marks on it, and Rebecca stopping Alex from urinating on the aforementioned field we were off to Truman’s pad.

Apparently Truman and his wife were more frugal than Alex. They painted their kitchen all an ugly blue and had just one nice possession: a piano. And surprisingly: a television (from which Mrs. Truman watched wrass’lin and baseball.) Apparently Truman was a scrub, since he technically didn’t even own the house he lived in. We couldn’t even take pictures to show the place, a complete 180 in freedom from the last tour. So we left for St. Louis, taking the broken-compass route to Oregon.

If St. Louis had a yelp, we'd give it 2.5 stars, just because it has the City Museum, which we didn't even have time to see. We got in near midnight to find that there was still bad traffic, likely due to its clusterfuck of a road system. By the time we found the City Museum (only because it had a Ferris wheel on the 20-story rooftop), we were sleepy and decided to head to our hotel without getting to go on giant slides like we had anticipated. Despite calling ahead of time, our hotel did not forewarn us that there was a big boxing match in town and most of the rooms were gone. Not only that, but despite boasting their "FREE" things on billboards, Drury hotels charge you $12 for parking on top of the $150 to sleep overnight. But I guess their sub-McDonald's quality "hot breakfast" makes it all worth it.