I decided to take a trip to visit the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City. I took the free trolley to its southern terminus at Union Station. Outside the station was a T-Rex sculpture. Tourists would stop to take selfies with the dinosaur. The Kansas City Science Center was inside the station and dinosaurs were on display. Look at the muscular legs on that dinosaur. Visible in the background of the sketch is the tower of the World War I Museum.
There was another exhibit of small gauge railroad displays which filled a large back room in the station with quirky and odd towns with railroad trains circulating the circumference. Some displays were of idealized small towns but others had dinosaurs wandering the streets and or mermaids and penguins in the waterways. One village was made entirely of Legos. It was an odd assortment of worlds.
From the station there was still a several mile trip to the museum. I decided to try and rent an electric scooter. These scooters are scattered throughout downtown Kansas City. You rent it and then just leave it wherever when you are done with it. To rent it you scan the URL code with your phone. I found three scooters across the street from the station. It took half an hour to get all the info into my phone. The scooter was like a skate board with handlebars. It was fun to use to start reaching 15 miles per hour. There was a bit of a learning curve, to figure out how to balance on it. After about a mile, I was up to speed.
Then I started scooting up a hill. Now in Florida there are no hills, so I wasn’t surprised that the scooter started to struggle going up the hill. I had to start pushing off with my foot to get to the top of the hill. Why was I paying for an electric scooter that didn’t have enough power to get up a hill? I came to the conclusion that the scooter battery had died. I left it parked at the top of the hill and started walking the rest of the way to the museum.
The remaining walk turned out to be much longer than I suspected. I walked through the full length of several long parks and through a ritzy neighborhood. I was exhausted by the time I got to the museum. Then I hiked every hall of the museum to see all the art. By the end of the day I had a severe case of museum burn. There were several Vincent Van Gogh paintings, and quite a few Thomas Hart Benton paintings. It was an impressive collection.
I decided I could not walk all the way back downtown, so I used Uber for the very first time. It was nice to finally relax in the back seat seeing all the neighborhoods I had just explored on foot. Pam and I used the scooters again another night to explore all the murals that are scattered around Kansas City. Pam showed me how to check the battery level before we rented the scooters and they lasted the duration as we explored up and down the alleys.