Kansas City sits on Missouri’s western edge, straddling the border with Kansas and it is Missouri’s most populated city. today, it is known for its BBQ and blues, but in the early 1900’s, it was a city of vice and corruption.
The real reason we stopped was to meet up with my bestie, Cindy, who was there for just a day or so on business. We enjoyed a scrumptious meal with her and her co-worker, Amanda, downtown, but failed to do this city justice before departing the following afternoon.
The Missouri Rive runs right through downtown so there are unique bridges that cross the river to reach hotels, restaurants, and shops that line both side of it. I wish we’d arrived earlier for dinner or returned downtown the next day to stroll through the area as the architecture looked interesting.
Following dinner, we headed to the Bass Pro Shop parking lot for our overnight stay.
We didn’t research the area well so we missed a lot of interesting historical locations, like the restored Kansas City Union Station which opened in 1914 and was the third largest station in the country. The train traffic through Kansas City was key to its boom in the early 1900s . The other contributing factor was vice! Once called “the Paris of the Plains”, this city was ruled by “Boss” Tom Pendergast, a very powerful and corrupt man who made much of his fortune from bootlegging, gambling, speakeasies, and a red light district that flourished, even during Prohibition. To date, Kansas City has a thriving cocktail culture that dates back to this era.
They also claim to have more fountains than any other city in the world, except Rome and we didn’t visit even one.
They have several art museums, a steamboat museum and the American Jazz Museum, which I am sad to say we missed.
With just a few hours in town the next day, we made a quick visit to the WWI Museum and Memorial, which also has a great overview of the city, and we inhaled some delicious BBQ from Joe’s Kansas City BBQ that was listed on Anthony Bourdain’s “10 Places To Go Before You Die”. It deserved to be on the top 10 list!
As an aside, I should mention that for the second time in our travels, the wind caught the RV door as Doug was bringing in the BBQ order and the safety glass in it fractured. We had to use the last of our packing tape to hold all the little spider cracks together and prevent it from falling out of the frame. We couldn’t replace it until nearly a month later when we met up with Cindy again at her home near Phoenix.
We loved the visit with Cindy and Amanda and the Joe’s Kansas City BBQ, but didn’t do the research on Kansas City that we should have to really take in the history and unique offerings of this river city.
