Alicia planned for months, pulling off parties and puffballs and surviving a flip-flop crisis. I did little ahead of the night before my flight, when I rounded up various destinations on a not-to-scale map.
It got away from me a bit as there kept being more places to mark, but it did the job. Still, I plotted a trip to AAA (opens at 8:30) in Portsmouth just ahead of the bus to Logan (which left at 9:00). I love when things like that work out.
Friday got underway with Juke Box Hero, a Rock Band classic. I took it as a good omen. After skulking around the sketchy parking lot by the closed movie theater and trading in the originally-proffered map of Kentucky, I comfortably made the bus with state and city maps in hand.
C&J Trailways has always been a tough one for me. Pristine, but expensive. Convenient, but scheduled. It beats paying Logan parking prices, but ultimately I'd prefer a lower-frills / lower-cost option. This time, I did enjoy the ever-looping black-and-white TV episodes, eventually realizing that it was that weird Addams Family show that used to come on before Saturday morning bowling. Now, I can't get enough of that John Astin grin.
At the airport, I finally had time to sit in one of the sweet rocking chairs.
The view was pretty nice. As always, I wondered who bothers to stay at a Hyatt this close to the airport.
We were lucky. Discount carrier Frontier Airlines flies only two routes to New England, but one is a Boston<-->Kansas City direct. A three-hour flight for under $100 - not too shabby. With such a small presence, Frontier has a gate-sharing arrangement with US Airways Express. They used equipment that I thought carried a long-defunct brand, but I was mixing up Midwest with Eastern Airlines. Midwest also no longer exists, but did until very recently; they were merged with Frontier under the latter name. I later found out that the warm cookie presented as a Frontier trademark was actually stolen from Midwest and has a rich history.
I thought I was flying to MCI, but the airport marketed itself as KCI. Understandable, but the official explanation is pretty weak - call us KCI, even though it's not a legal airport name. Not many cities start with the disallowed letters of K, N, or W, but note that Newark, for example, is stuck with EWR. Whatever the letters, I was in the city of fountains!
I grinned, remembering Bill James's 1986 essay about how his home city suffered from its insecurities, obsessively comparing itself with luminaries such as Rome and New York and always looking silly as it came up lacking. He compared this to the sad saga of the Kansas City Athletics, who made a number of suspicious trades with the New York Yankees en route to recording 0 winning seasons in 13 tries during their time in KC.
MCI Terminal C was air-conditioned to the point of chilliness, I waspishly noted the energy overuse. I ate my words a bit after stepping outside. It was mid-90s and very humid all weekend, barely reaching 80 at night. Highly unpleasant, to be sure, but it's easy to overstate the unpleasantness - it was comfortable unless you stayed out in the sun long enough to start sweating.
I get to be a member of National's "Emerald Club" through work and was genuinely pretty excited about having my pick of the "Emerald Aisle". Last time, I got a sweet Chrysler 300! This time, the pickings were slimmer but I was pleased to have a chance to drive a Jetta, what with all their clever advertising over the years.
The instrumentation was slick, but the acceleration was odd, with a gap between hitting the gas and getting sound or RPMs from the engine. Also, it had small side mirrors and my pet peeve of flimsy, small sun visors. I'll pass, but thanks.
There were clear stations all over the FM dial, but (not surprisingly) most were country, conservative talk, or religious. Fortunately, I soon settled into a blues show on KKFI. The excellent Friday Night Fish Fry was a standout. I love to party!
My prior trip across Kansas City, last September, featured tornado warnings and very real thunderstorms. This one was a lot more peaceful, even at rush hour. Nothing slow until some lane closures on I-70 east of town, and even that wasn't too bad. Getting to drive under a cable-stayed bridge similar to Boston's gorgeous Zakim Bridge had me grinning widely.
KC has a pretty clean grid which continues into Independence despite the interruptions of I-435, train tracks, and a waterway.
The grid made it very easy to find Megan's mom's house. I was pleasantly surprised and relieved at being able to exchange warm greetings with everyone; it had been a while. After we prepared the girls' night entertainment, I checked into my trusty (twice in a year - yeah, we're going with "trusty") America's Best Value Inn one city east in Blue Springs.
The rehearsal dinner was in downtown Independence; I passed a number of near-mansions on South Main along the way. Downtown seemed odd; it was a bit quiet, but I think what got me was the lack of any tall buildings. I'm not sure any were over two stories. At home, many small cities have old mill buildings or are tourist towns with hotels that are, if not huge, at least a few floors high.
Dinner, a BBQ buffet, probably fell short of great but the brisket, pork and all the fixings were more than good enough. We sat with old friend Meg and a high school friend of Megan's named Marla, who was a great conversationalist, knew her field/passion (art) impressively well, pointed me towards a bookstore, and even claimed to have heard of Bill James. As Alicia would say, a great random dinner companion for a guy like me.
We lingered after dinner, talking to Adi's Romanian parents in French with varying degrees of success, and it was dark by the time we left. The moon was full, huge, and yellow; even the motel bright lights could do little against it.
Inside, the AC worked and the Royals got a game-winning homer from Eric Hosmer before I passed out nice and early. It felt good to be back on the road.
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