KC Tour Day 3

We slept late.  Got up, had breakfast.  Waited 15 minutes then celebrated 3 birthdays with a donut party.  This is the way to start a tour day.  Our first stop was Kauffman Stadium, home of the Kansas City Royals, last year’s World Series winners.  True to Kansas City, the ball park has fountains.  We watched the grounds crew meticulously groom the field in preparation for the evening game.  It’s a beautiful ball park.  The boys enjoyed sitting in the dugout and seeing where foul balls hit the ceiling in the press box.

We left the stadium and ventured back downtown to Johnny’s Tavern where we ate burgers and fries.  It was conveniently located across the street from the College Basketball Experience, our next stop.  The College Basketball Experience was a fun, interactive activity where the boys shot baskets, dribbled balls, measured their wingspan, compared vertical leap height and threw passes during a timed event.

Back on the buses and off to the American Jazz and Negro League Baseball museums.  We were introduced to the museums and our thinking was challenged by an engaging guide.  She pointed out a personal frustration with the terms black and white.  She was looking forward to the time when we all simply referred to ourselves as American, a nice thought.

Kansas City was home to some of the early developments of jazz.  It’s where the term Jam Session came from.  The corner of 18^th and Vine was the place to be for jazz music in the early 20^th century.  The adjacent Negro League Baseball museum also showed Kansas City to be a prominent venue for the sport and participants.  We learned that the two activities, baseball and jazz, were intertwined with the fledgling Kansas City BBQ business, which turns out to be a very competitive industry.  The boys sang a couple of impromptu songs at the museums that were greatly appreciated by staff and other museum goers since they naturally appreciate good music.

This was Allegro night out where we hopped on a special bus that took us to 3 different BBQ restaurants.  Cantabile went to Woodyard BBQ and then to a water park.

Allegro night out was great.  Allegro, Mark, Todd and chaperones were met by a special bus that went to three different Kansas City BBQ restaurants.  We learned some history about the growth and rivalry of the business, and had three separate dinners consisting of a mixture of ribs, sausage, turkey, coleslaw, French fries and beans. There was agreement that all of it was all really good with nuanced interpretations of why one was superior to another.  As a thank you to our guide Stephanie, the boys sang Uptown Girl that brought her to tears.  She informed them that she had never been serenaded before.  Having simply not had enough we asked the BBQ bus driver to drop us off at an ice cream shop where the boys gorged themselves on a variety of flavors. By now it was dark.  We walked a few blocks to one of the fountains and sat around it enjoying the water lit by colored lights waiting for Joe to pick us up and bring us back to the hotel.  Sleep came quickly and easily.