My first night there we had a little belated birthday cupcake treat to celebrate. My mother made them and frosted them with real chocolate frosting. They were pretty tasty.
I was watching the news the next day and noticed that it happened to be Missouri's tax free week. Perfect timing! So of course, I did a little shopping since we don't have the best selection in this area. Sales tax there is quite a bit higher than Okaloosa County's 6%. One place the tax rate was 9.5%, so think of the money I saved :) Sure...
Besides shopping, we also played my dad's Wii. We played Mario Cart, Wii Sports (baseball, tennis, bowling, boxing), and Cabela's Big Game Hunter. It was nice to have two people who are worse than me playing Mario Cart. For once I wasn't last...yes!! The highlight of the Wii playing though had to be when my mother and I boxed. Let me tell you, electronically taking out 28 years of frustrations on my mother never felt so good :) Just kidding...well, sort of. She still loves me. I knocked her out. I think we also knocked my father out with laughter. He was dying watching us air punch and throw jabs.
Of course, no trip to my parent's house would be complete without mentioning their dog Charley. Charley recently had knee surgery, but has healed completely. She is one spoiled bichon frise. She lays around and eats treats all day. But at least she does it looking cute, as my mother would say.
One night my dad decided he wanted to take pictures of me and his corvette at the front entrance to the neighborhood. It has a waterfall/fountain feature that he thought would look nice in the background. After we took a few pictures, I thought it would be fun to stick my foot in the fountain to see how warm or cold the water was. I thought my dad told me to get in the fountain and he'd take my picture. I thought that might be fun, so I stepped in. It appeared to be only knee deep, but no, it was about waist deep. So I lose my footing and fall in. Fabulous! Now I'm all wet and really embarrassed. My dad is laughing and so am I. All of a sudden some dude on a bike rides up and asks us if we want him to take our picture. Why not? At this point I can't be humiliated any more.
The next day we went to the Ameristar casino to play the slots. I only had $3 in my wallet so I didn't last long, but I still had fun. My mom and dad had better luck and made their $15 last a while longer. We had some good luck on the "Mr. Cashman" machine. Ultimately they lost it all, but we had fun playing.
One thing I wanted to do while in KC was eat some barbecue. I saw on the Food Network that a famous place to go was Arthur Bryant's. There just happened to one inside the Ameristar. The special of the day was the beef sandwich, so we each got one. They were huge sandwiches. The meat was good and had a nice smoke ring and flavor. There were 3 different sauces to choose from as well. I liked the sweet heat. We all enjoyed our sandwiches and a little taste of "legendary" KC barbecue.
And with that, my five day trip drew to a close. It went by pretty fast. At least I'll get to go back for Christmas in 4 months. I'm glad I got to see my parents. Shame on a certain sister of mine, who lives in KC, and was "too busy" to come see her only sister. She knows who she is. Don't worry, I'm not bitter :)
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