i got back home from my weekend in kansas city last night at 12:30am. it was an interesting trip to say the least. kansas city is a pretty interesting city. it's almost the antithesis of boston. the city is spread out across the middle of nowhere. we did stuff, went places, drove around downtown and the immediate area - never did i feel like i was in a town that had enough people to support a football team. whether or not that is a good thing is up to you. also, while the region would not qualify as 'hilly' under any standards, there were enough rolling hills for geoff to argue time and again that chicago is much, much flatter and kc isn't that bad.

the whole saga of kansas city has to go back to thursday at work, when one of the guys at work came in to the fishbowl and said, "here. have fun" as he placed a hp nc6000 next to me. it's mine for 30 days, and it makes air travel a breeze. laptops are awesome.

friday morning i woke up and decided to check the status of my flight some 3 hours before i was scheduled to depart. i found out that my flight on midwest airlines was stopping for 30 minutes in milwaukee. never before had i been on a "going to A, continuing on to B" flight and actually continued on to B. despite the whole 'breaking ground in personal air travel' thing, i was not thrilled about going to milwaukee. whatever, i'll suck it up and deal.

took a while to get from jen's back home. i took my time getting ready, stupidly. i took over an hour to get from my house to the airport terminal on the T, and i was in the line to check in about 20 minutes before my flight left. i made the flight, but it was close, and more importantly, the entire "flying on midwest airlines" thing didn't click at all.

i started to realize that i knew the name 'midwest' when i saw the inside of the plane i was going to take to milwaukee, continuing on to kansas city. instead of going 2 on one side and 3 on the other, or 3 and 3 on each side of the aisle - configurations this plane's size could have handled, i think - each row had 4 extra-wide leather seats. whoa. this ain't just for first class, too. the whole plane. it didn't totally click, however, until the stewardess told us that we would be getting the midwest airlines "signature baked-on-board chocolate chip cookies" during our flight. ohh, right, midwest, that business-oriented airline with the nice seats and the fucking chocolate chip cookies. duh, how could i forget?

i immediately realized that i'd be getting more cookies on my flight from milwaukee to kansas city. what a great find! having not eaten any food all day, the extra cookies would easily make up for having no time in milwaukee to find a real meal.

milwaukee's airport is like cleveland's except with about a tenth of the people and 100 times more boring. and the c-town airport, outside of crazy terminal d, is pretty boring if i recall correctly.

anyways, onward to kansas city. the kc airport is pretty sweet. from what i could tell and what geoff told me, each terminal is basically a crescent moon, with security check points for every 3 gates and baggage claims very close to each gate. overall, very well designed for a quick in and quick out, no sitting around at all kind of experience. i provide this information as an FYI, do with it what you will.

so geoff picked me up and we drove through some slightly rolling hills and lots of nothing down south to downtown kansas city. geoff lives extremely close to the center of downtown kansas city, and it seemed like a ghost town to me. we saw 5 to 10 cars at most at any intersection, and very limited traffic anywhere else. and he has a goddamn parking lot across the street from his nice loft apartment. damn you kansas city for having excesses of the exact amenities that make boston so incredibly painful. i mean, the whole ghost town thing kinda sucks, but the parking and the nice cheap apartments are very cool.

it was clear that geoff was happy to be out of work early, and we went to setting up my laptop and creating a war room for the draft. we had two laptops set up, as well as the desktop behind us showing the tribe game via mlb.tv, and two tvs, the smaller one showing the draft and the larger one showing video games at some points, and at other, more key draft-related points we had the draft up on the big tv and nba playoffs or other random crap on the small tv. i mean... it's the way to live. especially the laptops and wireless internet. we had to set up the wireless internet on friday from scratch, but after a little yelling we got a nice secure setup going. this worked up quite an appetite, and being in kansas city, we had to go to a steakhouse. i mean, we decided this about 2 days before i decided i was even going to kansas city for the draft, so yeah, steak it was.

the question arose immediately - what steakhouse? geoff was all over this. we went over to the ameristar riverboat casino and ate at the steakhouse there, the great plains cattle company. his logic was flawless - you get an amazing quality steak with great service and you can still dress like a bum because its a casino. on top of all this, we'd be in, yes, a casino. so some casino could break out, if we wanted.

we walk in to the steak house and are seated almost immediately. "smoking or non?" "non, please" "you guys didn't look like smokers" - this offhand exchange between geoff and the host of the restaurant really stuck with geoff, even though i think the host meant it as a compliment. after being seated, after time had passed and i thought we had moved on ... "he didn't think i was cool enough to smoke, is that what that was about?"

our meal was farily niv and geoff-ish, which i think only chad can really understand, with both of us getting the porterhouse, but me getting fries and medium rare and caesar salad and geoff getting mashed and medium and some salad he wasn't going to eat either way. we also got onion rings as an appetizer. there were two interesting points about the appetizers.

1) for $12 we could have the luxury of eating fried rattlesnake. we didn't.
2) the onion rings were billed as colossal. this does not even begin to explain how huge these onion rings were. they were like half an onion each. half a giant onion. the outermost layer of a half of a giant onion. they were quite, quite good. the problem was that they were huge and if we actually went for all of them our porterhouses would have gone unfinished. which mine almost did anyways, but geoff pep-talked me into finishing it. the steak was delicious, by the way.

we were both incredibly stuffed. i could barely get up from the booth at the restaurant. given this, we decided not to go gamble, but instead to head back towards kansas city. now, an aside for interesting facts involving missouri casinos and the drive back towards downtown

1) missouri casinos are all riverboats. they have to be capable of floating down the river. and there are strict rules on how much one can lose in one session of gambling. it's weird that the midwest is more puritanical, in this sense, than connecticut.
2) we drove by what looked like a large-ish hill on our right, and for the first time ever geoff noticed that there were a lot of tunnels driving in to the hill. like, under it. he started freaking out about how it was a military base or a secret government facility, but i saw the word 'suntropolis', which i assured him we would google when we got back to the warroom loft. about 5 minutes later, he asked me what the word i saw was again, if it was "sun a po po" or something. i laughed so hard i almost threw up and geoff threatened to drive the car into a ditch. so that was something.

anyways, geoff decided to give me the grand tour of KC, which led us to the first shopping center in the united states, the plaza or something. more asides, which really are not asides but the meat of this story-

1) there are a fucking lot of fountains in kansas city. geoff told me a long time ago that there were more fountains in kc than any city other than rome. somehow, this turned into me calling kansas city 'the paris of the midwest'. i pitched this at work, i pitched it pretty hard to geoff and one of his friends (see day two), and i was in this state of limbo between thinking it was an actual nickname for kansas city and thinking i invented something amazing. in fact, neither were true - detroit is referred to as the paris of the midwest. so... yeah.
2) we picked up winning eleven 8 while in the plaza... this is a konami soccer game that is widely regarded as more realistic than fifa and only lacking in official teams, which it still is. however this year's version has real players and some real teams, so supposedly it's the one that finally is able to go head to head with fifa.... well, i'll save a post about winning eleven 8 for another time. i liked it, geoff did too but not as much. i'll discuss later.

so let's see, i saw the plaza, which was an incredibly nice part of town that belonged more in a california than a kansas city, i ate steak, and i saw lots of nothing... time to go to the warloft and play this new video game until we pass out. which we promptly did, with some watching of baseball and mls soccer interspersed. not much to report from the evening/night/latenight, except that saturday was amazing and really deserving of its own post, so i'll get on that very soon.