Travel Blog: Kansas City (3)

It had been a long set of years, but I was finally returning to Kansas City (my hometown) for my own bachelor party. I am getting married in November of 2026, so it was my turn for a little bachelor party of my own. The trip started on Thursday August 6, with Alyson dropping me off at the airport for a 9:55am flight. Like my luck it was delayed until about 10:35am so I started off the weekend with a very tiny delay.

A few TV episodes later I was landing in Kansas City to an airport I no longer recognized. The new airport that started in 2019 was finally operational by the time I returned in 2026 and boy it was something to see.

It doesn't give it justice for one my phone photos, but this terminal was insanely cool. For a split second when I de-boarded the plane I thought I got on the wrong plane, because I did not recognize the airport. The ceilings were so high and everything looked clean and pristine. The bathrooms had digital numbers on the door that counted how many stalls were available, with the numbers live updating as I looked at it. Though I was comparing in my head an airport built in the 70's to one that was completed 3 years ago.

Once the rest of the bachelor party crew arrived we met up at one friend's house to grill some burgers, have some drinks and start the party. It had been a very long time since I had taken off time from work such that hanging out on a Thursday was such a fun break from the constant work action. Once 4pm had passed we could check into our Airbnb which was in the heart of Westport, KCMO.

An area of town that wasn't quite as developed back when I lived in Kansas, but it seemed tons of areas (Crossroads, Westport, Midtown) had been expanded with activities since I last visited. The Airbnb exaggerated the listing a bit, but the owner of the unit had plenty of other homes. It probably was just flipped to be a rental and it showed - nothing to complain about, but the early days of Airbnb when it was actual shared homes was way cooler.

As we got situated we were a couple minutes away from a wing place, so it was time to do a Hot Ones Wing Challenge. For those out of the loop - increasingly hot sauces over 10 wings.

Some of these wings the sauce was so hot that I was in pain, lips on fire and no amount of water, lemonade, mac n cheese or ice cream could quench it. Time healed all wounds for this brief pain and we completed the challenge after consuming a large amount of liquids.

Once we recovered it was time to relive some old days and boot up an original Xbox that was still rocking an Xecuter 3 modchip. Alongside that we had 2 Xbox Series X's and a Switch 1. It was pretty fun trying to super bounce on Halo 2 and playing copies of my Phantom Mappack I made all these years later.

Thankfully the house had a router just sitting on the floor in the dining room, which helps reinforce the type of rental this was. As no one actually living in this house would just have that setup for their network. For us that was beneficial so we could run a long cable from that to the living room to grant Internet to our consoles.

The night went long playing Halo 2, Halo MCC, Super Smash Bros and more. Reminiscent and nostalgic of the childhood of how much gaming in person we did on a variety of games. Today that is replaced with Discord and online gaming, but it was fun to return to the era of gaming with friends in front of a TV together. We hadn't done anything like that in over a decade. I was up way past my normal bedtime consuming way more alcohol than I normally do, but it was a great night of gaming with friends.

The next morning I got up with roughly 5 hours of sleep and went out for a calm slow 2 mile run in the city. It was an interesting route to take because it was basically downhill the entire way to the end of the Mill Creek Park, then I had to run back up the incline all the way back home. Looking at Garmin though I am only talking about ~170 feet of elevation change between high/low point of the run.

Day 2 was now here and I was still roughly in the dark on the activities planned, but I knew mini putt putt was one of the activities on the day. This was a place known as Puttery, that was an indoor mini golf & restaurant & bar in one.

We did an eat & play combo, so we could play as much golf as we wanted while getting a $25 (or less) meal covered. It was my first time at a Puttery and it seemed like the courses were really small. Each course was 9 holes and sometimes a hole was barely 10ft between start & end. As the picture shows above you twist/turn among holes alongside a bunch of other people doing the same. What was cool is the technology in play for recording scores, since at the first hole you enter names and input score. Your names are waiting for you at hole 2 and onward. I wish Florida golfing places did this, because it prevented the need of holding a pencil & paper.

So we did all 3 courses (27 holes) that the location had to offer and then grabbed a meal at the restaurant.

The Korean bowl stood out to me, which took awhile to arrive but it was a great lunch in a pretty cool building. We were in walking distance of most of these places so we could walk back up to 39th street and get back to our house to prepare for the next activities.

As we did a bit of gaming more of the friends disappeared all grouping up upstairs, leaving me alone downstairs. I had an inkling something was going on, but I also needed to clean up a bit before the bars, so went up to my room to change. When I came down all 4 friends were in different rompers (a shout out to my romper attire behavior) with a 5th one for me. I'm sure wearing a romper in public was probably the most nerve wrenching thing most of those friends did recently, but we rolled 5 rompers out into the city for a bar crawl.

We started at Casual Animal Brewing which started the rush of people either staring or talking to us regarding our outfits. We played darts and enjoyed a few rounds of drinks before we went off to another place. We arrived at Border Brewing Company which had a nice indoor/outdoor split with a guy selling burgers. They had a homemade seltzer here that tasted like pink lemonade and it was my jam.

It was fun watching a guy make smash burgers while drinking, but it was a bit too early for more food. This was a cool outdoor area covered with shade, even if it attracted a few people smoking here and there. It made sense once I realized that Missouri legalized weed, which explained why a smoke shop could exist on every street corner with a whiff of weed in random places. It isn't an exaggeration that standing in place I could see 4 different smoke shops while walking on the road.

I guess the rush of the legalization made an influx of new smoke businesses, but boy I would hate living near them as their massive LED bright colors seems like such a turnoff for the area.

Our 3rd place was Brewery Imperial and we sat outside in some hotter weather while enjoying a round or two. The night was getting darker so we had another bar planned deeper in the city. This is where we learned First Friday was occurring, so there were people & vendors everywhere. We walked out a place or two just trying to find a place for 5 that allowed us to actually hear our thoughts. We found a table at Up Down outside, but outside was competing with insanely loud music across the street setting off car alarms (probably from the bass) constantly.

Being in my 30's now the idea of being at a bar as the night fell shoulder to shoulder with people wasn't really my cup of tea anymore, so we left to head back to Border to get a burger which thankfully was not busy at all. Unfortunately the burger guy had left so we were floating around 10pm without a burger. Thankfully being my bachelor party we saw Cosmo Burgers across the street and ordered a smash burger or two.

We could eat the burgers in the existing bar so we enjoyed a late night snack and more drinks before ultimately ending our bar crawl there. It was a night of all ciders & seltzers for me & plenty of people sparking conversations with our group due to our attire. Like had become a pattern we got back to the house and gamed a bit more as people fell off to sleep.

The 3rd day arrived and I muscled the energy to go on another morning run despite only 4 hours of sleep.

I ran the same exact path as the previous day, but to my surprise as I approached Mill Creek Park I noticed an official race going on. I slipped onto their track and did 2 loops before heading back to the house. I'm sure no one noticed and it was fun to run alongside a couple hundred people on a nice recovery pace after little sleep.

It was only once I got home did I realize what I stumbled upon - an ultra race! This ultra was doing 4 laps of the track (roughly 4.1 miles) within an hour. If you completed it in-time you could rest with whatever remaining time there was until the next hour where it started again. I learned those competing in the "last man standing" were running in a different direction than the others. So now I felt a bit bad running among folks who were competing in a challenge.

After a morning run and a bit of morning gaming we went out for brunch at a local place called Snooze. It was the first place we visited that weekend that felt like a new physical build out construction wise. All the other places seemed to be built within rustic existing buildings of the past, Snooze felt like a newly built modern structure. Their menu was interesting and I stayed away from alcohol with a little recovery salad after two days of heavy drinking.

Our next activity was an escape room that was rated 8/10 difficulty with a 60 minute timer. We had a couple first timers to the escape rooms with us, so it would be interesting for sure if we could even escape. Since from my experience of an 8 person work escape room - sometimes more people makes it worse. For traveling to this area we walked to the street car and took it for ~25 minutes all the way to our destination.

There was a street car for both directions on opposite ends of the road which was fast and air conditioned. It seemed very well managed, because at one point an odd individual boarded the train and by the next stop police were onboard escorting him off. As we got closer to the River Market the amount of people on the train grew massively. We got off at our spot, but were in this awkward spot of being like 25 minutes early. There isn't much to do when you are early for an escape room so we slipped into a bar next door for a quick drink. However that service for 5 drinks was pretty terrible - we only got our last drink with minutes left till we had to leave.

Regardless, we slammed a single round and made it just in time for the Patient 57 escape room.

We struggled a few times yelling colors and positions back and forth between rooms as we tried to decode a Cyrillic alphabet. We got to slowly solve puzzles and expand access (secret doors, etc) to additional rooms with more complex puzzles to solve. Though we pushed through and solved it in 42 minutes and 17 seconds. No where near the record of 33 minutes, but we had fun solving the puzzle. Roughly my feedback regarding this room was:

• Some things opened silently. We missed a few times that something opened, because it made no noise.
• The keypads never illuminated a different color once solved, so if I missed a friend solving a puzzle their keypad didn't indicate that.

All minor critiques that stem from the different experiences you get from different escape rooms. Much like doing a CTF digitally you can burn too much time on something irrelevant and we probably lost most of our time digging into something that was not part of the puzzle. Like the most embarrassing being we were standing on a carpet that had a key to one of the puzzles underneath it.

Since we were staying on 39th street and Q39 was on 39th street we got some BBQ before our final activity. I failed to take a photo of any food from this venture, so instead a picture of the bag from our barbecue experience will have to do. The brisket was amazing, nothing Florida BBQ still has any chance of competing with. It was interesting to hear from the locals that the favorites I once knew (Joe's and Jack Stack) quality had declined compared to the rising Q39.

With food eaten we were preparing to head to the casino, which I think would only be like the 3rd or 4th time I've ever been to a casino. This time being my bachelor party I set aside $200 to gamble with and probably lose.

The friends started at the craps table, which still is mega confusing to me outside of the main bets. As money was mainly lost I slipped away to find a fun slot machine. After a bit of trial and error I was down $70 and found this Athena machine.

This one seemed interesting because I actually understood how it worked by seeing someone else playing it as I walked by. You try and get this picture of Athena in row 1, which then spawns a mode where you get the real money. Alternatively if you get 3 owls - you get that a bunch of free spins depending on how many owls are visible. So I took my remaining $30 bucks, loaded in my last $100 and started spinning.

The true embarrassment is I left the casino losing all $200 dollars, but at one point I won $157 while sitting at $194, so I was net positive and then won the mini or micro jackpot after winning 15 free spins on a $6 spin. I was at one point sitting at $640 dollars (so net positive $440) and gambled it all away. Oddly my machine broke and said "need attendant" when I was sitting at $640 so I sat and waited. Staff approached and fixed the machine and then I lost all $640 on $6 spins. Pretty insane how fast you can click a button and lose $6 looking back at it. Mad at myself for not walking away, but I kinda assumed any money I withdrew was going to be lost anyway. A couple of drinks of liquor in probably didn't help either.

There was a lady sitting at a slot next to me that was in an automatic wheel chair and could barely move probably high up there in the age, but she opened this box and there had to be thousands of $100 bills in there. Casinos wouldn't be everywhere if they lost money, so any time I see a high roller it just doesn't compute in my mind. It just seemed crazy to me watching someone load 100's into their slot machine like candy. I felt so uneasy just putting $100 into a single machine. Though I understand its not fun doing penny spins when a jackpot is then only dollars - you gotta spend money to take a chance to make money.

As our agreed funds were exhausted and all the mockery ended of losing $640 we decided to head on home. Like had become a pattern we got home late and gamed into the late night on a variety of games. 5 player Super Smash or Mario Party was always a good time.

The 4th and final day arrived with a checkout at 11am with a direct flight to make it back home. A workout was skipped because chaining multiple days of little sleep together put a number on my legs. We cleaned up the house and went back to Leawood, KS for a last brunch before going our different ways. There was way too much alcohol and drinks leftover, so we were well stocked. A good recap to the end of an amazing bachelor party while enjoying a brunch at Rye. Once everyone split I had one last Gin drink at Martin City Brewing before starting the Uber trip back to the airport for a flight home.

Much like sometimes on the blog, I'll be traveling home during the scheduled weekly post time (10:30pm) so how I got home will remain a mystery. Rest assured - I probably made it home, you just don't know when or how.