Day 12

The mornings all kinda seem like the hit 1993 movie starring Bill Murray, Groundhog's Day. We wake up at 7, shower, get kids dressed, go down to the hotel breakfast room for eggs, sausage, waffles, and yogurt before loading up the van to hit the road again. One of the fun things about this trip is that every day, we're getting people making comments. People saying they're from Washington too, or talking about a similar trip their family made, or how awesome this trip will be, or writing words of encouragement in the dirt on our van. We even had someone stop us today to ask how we liked our roof bag, because he just bought the same thing for his son.

Our first stop today was the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. They have a free Museum of Money which is pretty cool. They have several origami structures built with money which makes for some really pretty, intricate art. There's also a pretty large coin collection and some examples of bills over the years from silver certificates and gold certificates up to the $10,000 bills from the 1950s. There's a little display showing real and counterfeit currency and ways to spot the counterfeits, and a few fun interactive things for the kids. You can also go back to "The Vault" which is a viewing area where you can see Federal Reserve employees processing enormous stacks of money, but unfortunately photography is strictly prohibited in this area. You finish off the tour by grabbing a complimentary bag of shredded dollar bills which were removed from circulation, so we all grabbed a little bag of confetti.

Up next, we went to The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures. This museum was started by 2 women who realized they both had very similar fascinations. One woman was obsessed with tiny things and the other loved dolls, dollhouses, and other toys. They continued adding to their personal collections until they were so large that everyone told them they should just open a museum and they were like "Well, maybe we will". The museum is split into 2 distinct sections, with the lower floor being miniatures and the upper floor being everything toys. The miniatures were cool, the level of detail in them was certainly impressive. Upstairs were lots of toys from pretty much the early 1900s through the early 2000s, including a small selection of video game consoles. The toy section ends with 3 different marble tracks that were fun to watch.

Our next fun stop for the day was at the Kansas City Auto Museum. This one was outside of Kansas City proper in a city called Olathe, but it was close enough that I guess it falls under the KC umbrella. This place was pretty cool, and I know my dad would have LOVED it. There were so many beautiful, old cars. Every month, they feature a specific type of vehicle, and this month was military vehicles. They had a wide array of vehicles from a beautiful 1912 Model T to a 2020 Ford GT straight from the factory, and plenty of things in between. I've added a bunch of pictures at the link below, feel free to check them out!

After that, we hit the road and headed east to St. Louis, Missouri. We pulled into the hotel parking lot to check in and started unloading, just in time for it to start pouring rain. The clouds had been overhead for a while, but the rain came basically out of nowhere and it was substantial, like we were all in a big shower. We were only half done unloading the van, so we unfortunately had to stay in the rain a bit longer than we would have liked, but we'll survive! It's only water, after all.

Directly next door to the hotel is Helen Fitzgerald's Irish Grill and Pub which we had picked for dinner. The food was delicious, albeit not overtly "STL" (don't worry, we got the Toasted Ravioli so we get partial credit at least). It's a local, family-owned restaurant and everything we had was delicious. I had some of "A"'s pizza, some of "K"'s pasta, and I shared my nachos with everyone. I don't normally take pictures of my food, but these nachos were fantastic. The chips were potato chips and there were toppings piled high. The kids' meals all came with ice cream, so we got 2 ice cream cookie things and they were more than twice the size we were expecting, and only $5. During the meal, our waiter overheard that we were staying in the hotel next door and he asked what brought us to STL. We told him about our trip and we then got a visit from 2 other staff members that were interested in our journey. They were a great crew! And to top it all off, our waiter gave us a "road trip discount" (aka, he added a 20% employee discount to our entire meal). If anyone finds themselves in St. Louis, please give this place a chance, it's fantastic.