Kansas City

Apparently this city is known as the City of Fountains and has more fountains than any other city apart form Rome. There is one area known as the Plaza which is very close to where I am staying that has a lot of them. This is a shopping and eating area which has many exclusive shops and good restaurants. It certainly is one of the nicer places I’ve come across during the last few weeks.

Downtown there isn’t that much to see, much like many of the other cities I’ve found myself in. However, I did visit an old steamboat museum which was interesting and also looked around another rail station. Then I came across the Liberty Memorial. I wish I had known about this earlier as it contained a new museum all about World War One. It’s very new and doesn’t seem to appear on any tourist information and the only bit I did find was very out of date. So I only got just over an hour here before it shut but could have spent half a day in there. Real shame I didn’t get more time there.

So up in the morning for a flight to Richmond, Virginia via Atlanta for the last motor race that I’ll be watching.

Des Moines

So after the race rather than spend another night in Newton I drove about 35 miles West to Des Moines. This is a city which they aren’t really sure why it’s called Des Moines and to be honest after being here I wonder why it’s here at all !

OK, so it was a Sunday late afternoon but the place was deserted. Went for a walk to have a look round and every building seemed to a government, police, sheriff, jail of some sorts ! The only interesting building was the Iowa State Capitol.

Eventually found some people and had dinner in a micro brewery which was quite nice. Not quite sure about the raspberry beer that I had a pint of though !

Still couldn’t find much the next morning either and even on a Monday morning it was still deserted so jumped in the car and drove 200 miles South to Kansas City, Missouri. Now this is almost the very center of the US and it’s where I have given the car back after about 1,300 miles. So a day and a bit here now and the weather is back to normal with temperatures back up to 95.