29.04 - Day 105 - Kansas City
Monday 29th April - Kansas City (Day 105)
Good news: more pancakes with Nutella for breakfast. Bad news: it’s the first school day of Term 2. Thankfully Sienna is keen to jump back into her school work and actually so too is Seb - mostly because the hard copies of schoolwork for Term 2 have been sent ahead to Madison, WI where we’ll arrive later in the week - so for now it’s all on the laptop which is an easier sell.
After completing school and checking out we drive back into the city to go around the Money Museum, in the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a collection of stands in half of the ground floor lobby but the interactive nature - crayon rubbings to create notes, large selfies superimposed into a bank vault entertains all.
Plus there is a 28 lb / 2 stone bar of gold to try and lift (encased in perspex in a metal cage inside a case) but real gold nonetheless, worth about $600,000. And down a corridor - no photography section - a money processing room sifting through, counting and checking millions of dollars a day. One crate of $20 bills I estimate to be $8.5m, and there's multiple of these in the room, open being worked on.
In sifting through and removing old money, they shred $4m a day of cash. Of which, little pouches are available to take away, so we each snare a sachet containing apparently $83 of finely shredded bills. It’s not Disney World on the entertainment scale perhaps but it’s another free activity which are easy enough to find in every city and the breath of variation, if only an hour each, adds up to a well spent day.
But for the next 24 hours we do have one of those large scale entertainments - Great Wolf Lodge had been recommended to us by our Canadian friends (Danny & Kim) in Thailand, there are about 20 lodges in the US.
On the outskirts of the city this hotel with almost 300 rooms has a large waterpark as its core and smaller activities to the side. We knew the kids would love it, though one of the reviews I feel described it as the 7th level of hell.
The giant lobby with (fake?) stuffed wolves contained the chirpy receptionist Amy who even uttered to the kids - aren’t you just the cutest - with their funny accents. Though their funny accents resulted in Amy throwing in Mini Golf and Laser Tag for free so I’ll live with it.
Arriving then just after lunch into our Wolf Den room where next to our normal queen bed was a fibreglass den containing bunk beds. The kids' level of excitement keeps on rising.
As ever I’m wondering what are all these people doing here at the pool - it’s Monday late lunchtime, shouldn’t they be working. It’s probably only a quarter full which is great for us - only a 2 minute queue for any of the 3 main slides - 1, 2 or 3 people on inflatable rings. It’s great to repeatedly go down, each time Sen and Sienna as happy as the last time.
There’s also a river current to float down, plastic lily pads to jump across plus a large frame with two more slides and water spraying everywhere, including a 1,000 gallon bucket tipping from the top every few minutes.
Whilst the sun is still shining we do persuade the kids to get outside to play golf, Kate romping home to win with (a scarcely believable) four holes-in-one.
Whilst out the pool and dry we drive 5 minutes to a popular pub for seriously oversized portions. So we don’t sink in the pool Seb and I play a game of laser tag before the lure of the Triple Twist, Alberta Falls and Howling Wolf water slides can’t be avoided and we’re in there until it closes at 8pm.
The kids are over-excited more so than tired and take a while to fall asleep in their bunk bed den but eventually there is peace and quiet.