Our day in Kansas City has therefore been a tour of public washroom facilities. Hannah has been a saint, but it’s typical that the one day where I’ve felt like curling up in bed and blocking out the world is a day that we had to check out of our hotel at 11am and catch a train at 10pm.
Still, we managed to squeeze a few interesting things in. The first was the Kansas City Board of Trade. There’s a viewing gallery where you can watch people trading wheat futures. It’s like a stock exchange but with a country feel (one of the TV screens was showing American Football). We stayed for about five minutes, could make no sense of it, and left.
Then it was Hallmark Cards. They own the Crown Centre mall here and have a free museum. What we thought was going to be a diverting twenty minutes (not including toilet breaks) turned out to be well worth a couple of hours. Did you know that the sickly sweet rhyme is written first and the card designed around that? Best of all there’s a bow-making machine in a Perspex case. You press the button and see your little self-adhesive bow being made then it pops out at the bottom! After making 40 bows we thought we’d better move on.
We went to Fritz’s Diner, where I made my second food-related mistake of thinking I could eat myself well. The results were close to catastrophic, but almost worth it as your food at Fritz’s is delivered by an electric miniature train. Every table has a telephone that you call your order through on and five minutes later there’s a “choo-choo” and a train runs along a track high up the wall, depositing a tray with your food onto a platform which then lowers down to your table. We ate late so there was only one other family in there with a two-year-old who walked around shouting “Tickets! Tickets!” the whole time. Even that wasn’t too annoying.
I’m now in the Amtrak station having had a bit of a sleep on their wooden waiting benches after consuming as much water as I can stomach. I can also now describe the pattern of the marble on the floor of the third cubicle along of the men’s toilets in intimate detail. The idea of being rocked constantly in a tiny bunk does not excite me, but hopefully the worst is over. And from now on it’s fine – Albuquerque is known for putting green chillies in all it’s food.
Wheat futures - it's a tricky business.
Kansas City. It actually looks quite big from this angle.
Hannah peruses the changing tastes of greetings cards through the ages
Hallmark makes Crayola too. Ahhhh...
Hannah takes a bow.
Dialling in the food order.
Here it comes on its little train!
Amazing.
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