Due to this year's late spring, I had a free weekend that I didn't expect. I had planned to go climbing, but it was still too cold.
Instead, Letter J and I decided to go to Kansas City. He was humoring me since I had never spent any appreciable time there. I had been through it on the way to somewhere else, and I once went to a conference at an airport hotel, but was kept so busy all weekend that I never went anywhere except out to the hotel parking lot.
We headed off after work on Friday, and got to the our B&B around 9:00. We stayed at the
Jefferson House, which was a gem! The proprietors were around the corner at dinner with the other guests when we arrived, so we waited on the porch while they ventured home. It's on the west side of the interstate, and has a lovely view of the city from its perch on a hill.
Once we dropped our bags, we headed off around the corner ourselves, to dinner
at
novel (yes, that's with a lowercase "n"). I started off with a delicious concoction called a
Ruffled Feather: rye, smoked cumin, and ginger. So surprisingly tasty and wonderful. My appetizer was a
Fuji apple soup with
seaweed and miso. I could have done without the seaweed, which is normally my biggest complaint about sushi as well; I'm fine with the raw fish, it's the seaweed that gives me pause. For a main, I ordered the pig's head ravioli (no longer on the menu). It was quite delicious, and I'm always up for trying something new. This was perfect, because it came topped with crispy pig's ears! They are in little strips and taste mostly like bacon, but they're pretty tough to chew. The ravioli was delicious, but was a bit overshadowed by the novelty of the ears. (Did I blog about the pig's tails I had a The Libertine a couple of months back?) Letter J had the roasted
chicken with radishes, scallions, and egg yolk. He shared a bite, and it was good, but I prefer pork to chicken 9 times out of 10. We split two desserts: the
flourless chocolate cake with bourbon caramel sauce, peanuts, and a fancy housemade whipped cream, and
the coconut panna cotta with pineapple and gingersnaps. I think it's fair to say that we both liked the chocolate better.
Saturday began with a stunning breakfast of copious amounts of coffee, fresh oj, fruit with candied almonds, our proprietor's French
grandmother's scrambled eggs, spinach and roasted tomatoes with balsamic, rustic
toast (from the baker around the corner, more to follow), and potato hash with corn, bacon, and scallions. This last bit was delightful.
After stuffing ourselves with all that food, we did what good, red-blooded Americans do and went out looking for more food! We had to check out the bakery from whence the bread came. It's called
Fervere, and it was less than a block from our dinner spot of the night before, and we each bought two loaves to bring home. I ended up with a beer bread (their weekly special) and a dried fruit bread. From there, we headed to the City Market, the big downtown farmers' market. It was neat to see, but we didn't have anywhere to keep any perishables, so we left empty-handed. But if you find yourself in KC, it is a good place to go for beignets, fresh produce, and Indian spices. Across the way was a Chinese grocery which we stopped in just for kicks. You can find very, um, foreign things in a Chinese grocery store.
Once we were sufficiently weirded out at the grocery, we headed south to the
Liberty Memorial and
World War I Museum. Here's something we learned: go to the museum first, then to the memorial. We did it in the opposite order, and thankfully the elevator operator at the memorial was kind enough to let us up to the top without tickets, but only after we promised that we really were planning to go to the museum.
The views from below
The view from the top
We did indeed to to the museum, as promised, and it is amazing. It is not a huge building, but it is packed absolutely full of stuff. I overheard someone saying that the museum in KC has the largest collection of WWI memorabilia outside of the
Imperial War Museum in London.
The museum is arranged in a circle. You start out watching a video about the run-up to the war. Then the first half of the circle is the war prior to American involvement. There is so much to see!
Declarations of war
Bavarian 15cm heavy field Howitzer
Standard issue infantry rifles of various armies
A month-by-month timeline lines the wall
I probably spent more than two hours getting through the first half of the museum. (Fun fact: according to Lord Charles Beresford, for every artillery fuse manufactured in England, the British government paid one shilling to the German company Krupp Armaments, which held the patent.)
There's another video describing how America got involved in the war, and the remainder of the museum focuses on our involvement. While U.S. involvement was certainly pivotal, I frankly don't find it all that interesting, so I probably spent about 45 minutes on that side of the building.
Anyway, awesome. (There are also two little additional buildings up near the Liberty Memorial. Worth a peek, especially if you like maps.)
But I spent so much time there that we were starving by the time we got out. We headed waaay north to the
Cinder Block Brewery to try out some of their delicious brews. We shared a flight to figure out which beers we wanted, and I opted for the porter -- an unusual choice for me. We had some pretty unsatisfying food from the food truck outside, but it was enough to make us sleepy enough to need a nap . . . which for me lasted until 9:00 p.m.
Oops. That pretty much shot any dinner plans, so we found a Mexican dive named
Ponak's, grabbed a bite, and called it a night.
Probably ten or 12 years ago, I "borrowed" this book from Dad. By borrowed, I really mean that he had read it and said I should. I know this was 10 or 12 years ago, because I was in college. I remember that I was in college because I got about a third of the way through it, got busy with the semester, and never went back to it.
