This morning I led a small group on a walk through downtown KCMO, over to downtown KCK, and back.
We walked just over 10 miles from the City Market, south through downtown, crossing I-670 at the pedestrian bridge on the edge of the bluff west of Summit. At 17th we backtracked by way of Beardsley and walked down into the West Bottoms using the lower level of the 12th Street Viaduct. Heading northwest through the bottoms, we crossed the Kaw at the Lewis & Clark Viaduct, then …

Beardsley Road, a favorite short-cut connector between the River Market and the West Side (and Crossroads), reopened this past week to no fanfare, but to great joy to those who enjoyed taking advantage of it’s speedy bypass of downtown KC’s traffic and traffic lights.
There’s still a few finishing touches left so there are plenty of cones to be dodged, but quick travel from the north to the southwest parts of the downtown area is finally restored after far too long of a wait.

Just wondering if any of you are going to start bothering to show up at any of the places you got smoking banned at. Because it’s been a week now and I haven’t seen any of you at any of my regular haunts yet… just empty tables and barstools sitting waiting for you. One of the servers mentioned she’d like to thank you for her customers (and hence tips) being WAY down this week compared to the week before, and the regulars are starting to …

While walking back from the P&L last night I came across the worst parallel parking job I’ve ever seen, on the 1200 block of Walnut.:

I wish I had been present to see how many times this person backed up, angled, pulled back out, backed up, turned the wheels, pulled back out, tried again, tried again, tried again, before finally giving up and deciding that this was good enough.
I don’t know if they eventually got a ticket for this, but if they did I’m sure we’ll see a letter to the …

I love the amusing placement of a news headline and an unrelated photo on the front of KansasCity.com right now:

(For those outside the area, a bolt of lightning struck a tank containing over a million gallons of gasoline last night.)

Yesterday I was at Crown Center for a bit and took some pictures of kids playing in the fountains.

In doing so I caught an amusing sequence of images. The following two pictures were taken seconds apart… I cropped these down to make it easier to see what to look for:
(1) Dad taking kid into the fountain…

(2) Less than 10 seconds later, Dad comforting screaming crying kid :)