A Great Christmas Present Idea for a Full-Time RVer

Knowing that we don't have any space in our motor home for gifts, Luke and Jordan gave us the perfect Christmas present--a day of fun in their new home town.  Again, Luke is working a long shift at Children's Mercy Hospital.  So we missed him terribly when we used the gift certificate they got us at an upscale restaurant downtown.

Their generous gift certificate was enough to feed four of us some of the house specialties like chicken and waffles, eggs benedict with corned beef, and macaroni and cheese with burnt ends.  No food pictures, just photos of very contented eaters.

Jordan went on to work, and left us with the other part of our Christmas gift--tickets to the World War I museum in downtown Kansas City.  On most travel web sites it is rated as the number one thing to see in this city, but we still probably wouldn't have bought those pricey tickets on our own.  That made it a good gift, and it was the perfect day to tour the museum since our hosts were busy working. Blake was equally interested, and the three of us spent hours inside this great museum, relearning all those things about WWI that we have forgotten since our last history class.

We planned to ride to the top of the museum's tower, but the combination of the long line and the cold weather kept us on the ground this day.

From that same vantage point, we could see downtown Kansas City in the foggy distance and Union Station right behind us.

We headed to Union Station to see it decked out in its Christmas finery.

It was nice to see another beautiful Christmas tree this beautiful Christmas season!

Union Station is a special place for children with Christmas displays and wintery miniature trains.

So we enjoyed a great Christmas-present-day.  We are finding that the gift of an experience is great for full-time travelers that don't have room for anything new in the motor home.  But the main thing we loved about our first Christmas since retirement was getting to spend time with our children.  We played lots of games and shared good fellowship together.  We especially enjoyed spades, and found we were under more stress to make our bid than we had experienced in many months of our non-stressful retired lives. During some of the games our cards were so interesting we had to take pictures just to chronicle the experience.  Those that play the game of spades will enjoy the fact that Mark had been dealt a very good hand.  But it appears that his partner is not as happy with his cards.

Besides games and sight-seeing, we also enjoyed some good home-cooking that was a result of the group effort in the kitchen.  But we did hit one of Kansas City's favorite barbecue places on our way into town.  The food picture of the day would have to be those beautiful ribs from Smokin' Joe's.  We had a deliciously grand time in Kansas City and we loved our Christmas gift!