Saturday Funday in Kansas City

Every night this week, I've had big plans to put up a blog post, but other Christmas projects and last minute things took up my time. Tonight I can finally say that I'm done buying, making, wrapping and shipping presents. Now I just need to pack up for our Christmas vacation. But first I wanted to tell you all about our Saturday Funday in KC last weekend. We've done this once before when we try and pick somewhat touristy things to do around town but that was a long time ago and we kept saying we'd do it again. Well we finally decided to and I set about making a list of places we'd go. You'll probably be able to tell that these are places I picked without Joe's help haha.

Our first stop of the day was a local bakery called Strawberry Hill where they make a Croatian sweet bread called Povitica. I drive past this bakery every day on the way to and from work, and one day I finally decided to look up what Strawberry Hill was. I saw on their website that they let people watch the bread being made and offered free samples :) I didn't take any pictures at the bakery, but here is a link to their website: Strawberry Hill. Povitica is a delicious sweet bread that has tons of layers of thin pastry filled with a variety of mixtures. A couple of people reading this will be getting some for Christmas, but I won't say who :)

The Christmas tree at Crown Center.

Next we headed downtown to an area called Crown Center. It is where the Hallmark Card company was started (which is why it's the "Crown" center). The area has shopping, an ice rink, aquarium, Lego Land, and the Hallmark Visitor's Center. Which is where we were headed. The visitor center is essentially a Hallmark museum and it was really cool to look back through the history of the company. There were some fun interactive parts too and we even got to watch a bow making machine working and take home a free bow haha. When we were walking back to our car in the parking garage, we passed this creepy Santa who was just laughing and nodding his head. Joe was not amused.

Our next stop was Union Station. It is one of the only remaining grand Beaux Arts styles stations in the country. The Kansas City Union Station does still have an Amtrack terminal but it mostly houses several fun attractions (as well as a post office). We happened to be visiting on a day when Santa's train was in town, but the line to see him was too long so we opted to just see some of the other things there. We walked through their huge model train display and saw some pretty cool stuff.

This was part of the Lionel Train exhibit. Even the car at the McDonald's was on a track to go in circles.

We also checked out a little display they had with small scale models of old roller coasters from the local theme park, Worlds of Fun. It was fun to watch the little roller coaster cars running around the tracks.

Then instead of going to any of the paid exhibits (science center, planetarium, and not sure what else), we wandered around until we found the stairs to get to the second level of the station where we could check out the balconies. It was an awesome view from up there, and we also came across a little exhibit where they explained how the station had been restored after it had basically been left to fall apart. I love old buildings like this and am so grateful that someone chose to restore the station instead of just tearing it down.

After that we drove down to old town Overland Park, Kansas to get a bite to eat and check out some of the cool little shops. This probably wasn't Joe's favorite part, but we did see some fun stuff and got a little bit of Christmas shopping done. Then we came home and there was just enough daylight left for me to hang the six-pack snowflakes up outside and string up some lights.

My personal holiday motto :)

Overall it was a really fun day and now we have more things to add to our list of places to take all of you when you come visit us :) Well, Christmas is almost here and I'm getting excited. I hope you all have safe travels and very Merry Christmas holidays!