Day 2: Kansas City, MO 5/24/09

We started out today at the zoo. The weather was warm, sunny, and muggy. The zoo prides themselves on giving the animals large habitats to roam in. Since the animals have large habitats, that means lots of walking for us. It was a very nice zoo. It was divided into 2 different sections; Africa and other. We started in Africa, which is a mile walking tour. We took a tram over to Africa.We sat down to rest for awhile about half-way through Africa. Samantha fell asleep at some point in Africa.

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We only did Africa because we were hot and tired.
Marc was getting a little bored walking around looking at animals so we decided to try finding characters from his favotire movies. We found characters from the Lion King and Madagascar movies. We found from Lion King: Simba, Nala, Timon, Pumba, and Rafiki. From Madagascar we found: Marty, Gloria, Alex, Melvin, King Julian.
This is a picture of the kids on Gloria.This is a picture of marc with King Julian.After the zoo we had lunch at Fiorello's Jack Stack House. It had the best smoked ham, sausage, and turkey that we have ever had. it was yummy!
After lunch we headed to Union Station.
Union Station was huge!!Included in Union Station were the typical shops and restaurants along with a science museum, a theater/movie screen, a big train set to look at......a room for a traveling exhibit. Right now it is Narnia; The Exhibition. It was full of props from the movie. It took us about 45 minutes to go through the exhibit. We were not allowed to take pictures in the exhibit hall so the only picture we got was at the front gate.Outside of Union Station there was "Celebration at the Station", a celebration for memorial Day. The local Symphony Orchestra was performing so there was an instrument petter zoo. Marc walked over and immedicately found the percussion instruments.For dinner we went to the T-Rex cafe. This is a theme restaurant like Rain Forrest Cafe only with a dinosaur theme. There were anamintronic dinosaurs around each table. The food was so-so, and expensive, but we were paying for the experience. It was pretty fun.Part of the Celebration at the Station there were fireworks. Our hotel was about 2 blocks from Union Station so we were able to watch the fireworks from the parking lot of our hotel.
All-in-all, it was a good day.

Day 1: Kansas City, MO 5/23/09

We finally made it to Kansas City, MO. We woke up, had breakfast, and headed to their mall to explore it. After some exploration we had lunch at Fritz's restaurant. This is a restaurant where a train driving on a track delivers your food to you. The kids (and us) had a great time watching the trains go around the room. Each child got an engineer's hat when we walked in.This is a picture and a video of the train.
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After we had lunch we went to Kaliedscope. This is an open-ended art center provided by Hallmark. You walk into a room that is kind of sensory overload with art stations all around the room. There are "scrapes" of stuff from the Hallmark warehouse for the kids to create with. One example is there was a roll of gold foil wrapping paper that people were rolling into swords. There were ribbons and tissue paper among lots of other stuff.Kansas City is known for having hundreds of fountains through out the city. There was one by the mall we were at.After some more exploring in the city we went had dinner at Toby Keith's Bar & Grill. For dessert we decided to try a deep-fried twinkie.