Crossing Missouri

After our day traveling through Lovejoy Family history we decided to keep going into the night and make a rest stop in Kansas City, MO. First we had to drive over the Mississippi and pass through St. Louis. It was really a trip to be crossing the Mississippi again all the way at the top, when we had crossed it over a month ago down near the bottom in Louisiana.

Driving over the Mississippi

Our brief view of St. Louis.

The next day I took Izzy and Hannah to the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City. Eli and Elijah were sick and so we left them in the hotel to rest and hang out.

The American Jazz Museum on the corner of 18th and Vine in the old jazz district of Kansas City includes its own little night club that has really great jazz musicians come through and play on the weekends. Unfortunately we were there on a Tuesday.

The museum is primarily made up of kiosks where you can listen to some of the best jazz recordings ever made. But there are also interactive kiosks like this one where you can mix your own sound using a pre-recorded jazz track.

Izzy really loved this and spent a long time mixing his own jazz recording. He was very excited to have me try it too.

They didn't have a huge amount of exhibit artifacts but they did have items like this dress of Ella Fitzgerald's. I was satisfied.

In the same building as the Jazz museum is the American Baseball Negro League Museum. Izzy desperately wanted to go in and look at it as well. So we paid twice, once for each museum, and went in.

The displays in the Negro League museum were much more elaborate and information heavy.

There were some very moving quotes, and it really seemed to be a missing element of all of the earlier civil rights history we had discovered.

Ultimately Izzy was there for the baseball. He loves baseball.

At the end of the museum is a baseball diamond decorated in life size statues of some of the most famous players.

You can walk through the display. Izzy took this opportunity to pretend to play some ball.

He was so incredibly happy. I clearly need to get this kid on a baseball team.

Outside the museum is a statue of Charlie "Bird" Parker. Izzy insisted I take a picture of them in front of the statue. He said the head of Bird looked like Buddha.

We stayed in Kansas City for a couple of nights, but by the end of the stay the whole family had a bad cold. We ended up seeing very little of the city beyond this excursion. It seemed like the downtown was very nice, but the suburbs really reminded me of Redding. I couldn't tell if it was the climate, the area itself, or my mood because I was feeling so sick.