Sioux Falls, SD to Kansas City, MO

Sioux Falls is a pretty cool town. It’s named after a waterfall that runs in the heart of downtown.  We made a quick stop there before heading out of town.

Now we were heading into the heartland of America.  There wasn’t much to see and the long stretches of interstate highway were straightforward and monotonous.  That’s bad. We were heading into the most gluttonous part of our trip, but all we were doing was sitting in the car driving.  Well one person was driving.  The other was most likely napping.

The only thing cool we did was stop at the world’s biggest fireworks warehouse.  We were like 2 kids in a candy store, except 10000 times better since it was fireworks.  I ended up buying a “missile battery,” which is a couple hundred little rockets embedded into a box decorated with the American flag.

After what seemed like endless driving, we finally made it to Kansas City, which actually mostly lies in Missouri.  I was looking forward to trying some good KC barbecue, so we yelped the best place in KC, which was actually in a gas station.  Something about mixing gasoline, wood fires and smoke seemed kind of wrong to me.  The barbecue was good.  It was really good, just not OMG AMAZING like I thought it would be.  It was pretty cheap though, $20 including beer and tips is not a bad deal.

We spent the night in Independence, MO.  All the hotels in KC seemed to be sold out.  The Backstreet Boys were in town… maybe that’s why the hotels were sold out… eh… probably not.  Anyways, after dropping off our bags and chilling in the spa for a bit, we drove around town for a bit looking for a safe place to shoot off our fireworks.  We found a park in a secluded part of town.

One thing I learned is that fireworks out here are legit.  They’re definitely not like those little sparkly things or those little popper things we have in California.  The missile battery thing I bought had a couple of hundred rockets, but they were all pretty small, probably an inch and half in length, so I thought they would shoot up maybe a few feet at most…. I lit the box and stepped back.  When I set up the box, I didn’t realize that I set it underneath a tree. Much to my surprise 100s of little rockets were shooting up into the tree.  I was so afraid that the tree was going to burn down…. It was pretty awesome.  Best 20 bucks I ever spent.