Morning began with a Starbucks run. I swear, Starbucks in hotel lobbies are genius. Dave went down and picked up a soy latte for me and Earl Gray for himself, and we had those with the last bit of baked goods from the Amish bakers at Baker's Creek.
Check-out time wasn't until noon, so we took our time getting ready and our day really started with lunch. We went to Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue and ordered way too much food. I had pulled pork and a quarter smoked chicken. Dave had burnt ends and pulled pork. Both came with Texas toast and on top of that, we shared sides of coleslaw, potato salad, corn in a cheese sauce, and steamed broccoli. Everything was so good--good enough that we stopped and bought several bottles of sauce to bring home for everyone.
This was Dave the vegetarian's plate:
One of the best things we ate (aside from the BBQ) was a dish of corn swimming in a junky "cheese" sauce. I mean, like, liquid Velveeta junky. It was delicious.
After, we decided to return to the Nelson-Atkins Museum to see some of the exhibits that we had passed up the day before. We spent hours and hours looking at paintings. It's so amazing to just go from 15th century religious art to Contemporary art, to look at paintings by Van Gogh and Monet, then cross the hall and look at works by Andrew Wyeth, John Singer Sargent, and Georgia O'Keeffe. And after all that to walk down the hall again and look at ceramics from Great Britain and ancient Egyptian art...and even then to pass up the 22-acre sculpture garden and the galleries filled with art from China and Japan. It's just so much!
Look at that amazing teapot from England, made in 1755. It looks so modern!
And this, look!
And this, see!
So much to look at!
After awhile, our eyes were full again, so we went back to the courtyard and sat with coffee and flourless chocolate cake. We had to do a little shopping in the evening, too, so we soon left the museum. After our shopping, we stopped for a quick dinner at a place called 1889 Pizza Napolitana. We shared a chopped salad, a quatro formaggi pizza and something called a honey bee pizza (gorgonzola, pear, arugula, olive oil, and honey). It was quite tasty, but of course we had ordered too much.
There was still time to kill until our train, so we went back to Starbucks and sat and chatted for awhile. Around 9:00, we went off to return the car to the rental place, then we walked over to Union Station. We thought we'd only have about an hour or so before the train came, but then the train was late. Very late. Very, very late.
One end of the waiting room filled up with teenage Boy Scouts on their way to camp. They dumped their enormous backpacks wherever and took every available outlet to charge their cell phones. The other end of the waiting room was filled with a large Amish family, the women and girls in long dresses and white bonnets and black Nike tennis shoes. In the middle was a group of very loud, well-upholstered, middle-aged women. So that fun hour turned into a fun few hours.
Finally the train arrived and we duly tromped aboard. Our roomette was already made up for the night, so we climbed into our pajamas and then into our beds.
When I woke up early the next morning, we were somewhere in Kansas.
We were to spend the day on the train.
We breakfasted with a woman from China and her seven year old American-born son. They were from Chicago, on their way to Los Angeles, to Disneyland, a forty-hour journey by train. The little boy was quite loquacious, so I had fun chatting with him. At one point, his mom asked if I had children. I said no, and she said, "It is not always like this with children," meaning, sometimes they are not so happy and chatty. I said, "And that's why I don't have children."
We spent our afternoon looking out the window, surfing the internet on our phones, reading, painting (me), and napping (Dave).
We had lunch with the same Chinese woman and her young son. He ate a hot dog.
Our train was stopped for a long time, maybe ninety minutes, at the station in La Junta, Colorado, as several cars and another engine were added. While they do that, they have to shut off all the electricity on the train, which means no air conditioning and no toilets. We went and stood outside for awhile then we tired of standing in the sun and came back to our stuffy little roomette. There was announcement after announcement reminding people not to use the bathrooms because the toilets don't flush without electricity.
We got going again. And then stopped. And then got going again and then stopped. It rained for awhile, too.
This is when I started to feel like I was home again, when the earth turned red.
All the stopping ate up hour after hour until we were almost four hours late. My mother picked us up at the station and brought us home to the kitties.
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