KC, a brief stay

Following the splendor that was St. Louis, we arrived in KC prepared to be underwhelmed and frankly, we were.  If there's a heart or theme to this city, we didn't find it in our brief stay. Best we can tell KC is a bunch of disparate areas with no unifying center.  St. Louis had the Arch and Busch Stadium and a bunch of hotels/eateries near the river.  KC just doesn't feel the same at all.  Not necessarily bad, just different and in this guy's opinion just a bit less interesting.

Our first stop in KC was to the Power and Light District.  I must say it was super cool...KC Live, similar to the area in Louisville of similar name.  We arrived at what we thought was the start of the Germany-Brazil game, only to walk in on a throng of Brazil fans that were pouting.  We looking up and saw it was already 3-nil...and very quickly it was 5-nil.  Crazy.  We did hang out at McFadden's, a cool sports bar, and had a beer while we watched the complete humiliation of the Brazil team.  By the time the game has ended, we were super famished and figured it was time for some KC ribs. {BTW - heard that for USA games this entire region in picture below was totally packed with people which was easy to imagine when we saw how great an area it was for watching any sort of event...giant screens, tons of bars, plenty of places to sit, etc).

On the advice of the bartender at McFadden's we headed to Oklahoma Joe's and grabbed some ribs and dirty rice.  Mmm....quite good.  Rated as one of the best in KC, they didn't disappoint. The ambiance of the place didn't match Pappy's (this place was literally in a gas station) , but the food was on par.  Saying a lot giving how good Pappy's turned out to be.  If I would have gotten the same dish, I could have done the head to head comparison, but had to go ribs this time.  Susan and I split a rack.  They didn't have the fried corn, though, so on that count, Pappy's wins.  All in all if you're in KC and want some great food, OJ's is on point.

To wrap up our tour of KC, we decided to go check out some fountains (I guess KC is famous for them) and did this in the Country Club Plaza a definitely upscale dining and shopping region of the city.  This was totally different than the first two stops in our KC tour and there was historic architecture, fountains, parks, a tons of high end shopping places and a bunch of restaurants (like PF Chang's, Cheesecake Factory, Morton's and then some more exclusive sorts of places).   Kind of cool and if our stay here was longer, we probably would have spent more time in this district.

A wrap for KC.  Kind of dull, but ok.  Long drive tomorrow to Denver, but we've almost reached our ultimate goal of the drive!