Money Museum, Central Library and more!

Lots of things to blog about today. This summer is shaping up to be a very fun one-- even if I don't get to take a vacation!

Yesterday was a super fun start to the summer. JJ and I had a wonderful lunch on the patio at Cafe Trio. The patio has a great view of the Nichols Fountain on the Plaza (minus the parking lot-ha!)

I had the Mac Daddy and it was DELICIOUS! The salad was also wonderful, it had the best dressing. Maybe my favorite part of the lunch were the two guys sitting at the table next to us. Both had the most adorable Australian accents!  It was impossible not to eavesdrop! :)

Then, we went to the Money Museum, which is just inside the Federal Reserve Bank at Main and Grand. This is a nice little museum with free parking and admission. We learned that the Federal Reserve bank is like the supervisor of all the banks in the region. They make sure all the banks have plenty of cash. We got to see part of the cash servicing area and watched workers package up millions and millions of dollars. They also had some robots that carried around the money and they were named Huey, Dewey and Louie!

Of course, this big, important building in KC, which was built in 2008, has a beautiful fountain right out front! Here's Fountain No. 91!

The Museum had lots of old coins and examples of different currencies, from what they used as colonies to Confederate money. They even had a real gold bar valued at over $688,000!

Every visitor to the Museum gets a free bag of cash!

Today, I visited the Central branch of the KC Public Library, right downtown. It is beautiful! Even the parking garage is cool!

Here's the entrance to the children's section.

The building used to be a bank. Here's a picture of how it was as a bank and now the beautiful library lobby.

Downstairs, instead of a vault for the Bank, it's a vault full of movies to rent!

There was an exhibit of wood-carved pictures from Missouri native, Fred Geary. Mr. Geary was an artist who worked for the Fred Harvey Company, designing postcards and book covers and all sorts of things for the hospitality company. He also did all these beautiful woodcuts in the 1930 and 40s. Many were Missouri landmarks, like this picture below of Jesse James' house.

Here's one more fountain to add, No. 90. This is a beautiful fountain right on the Plaza on 47th St. It's pretty cool how the water shoots out of the horses' noses.

That's all for now, more adventures to come! Laura

Real Life Where's Waldo?

Ok, so this week I was informed about an awesome thing that U-haul does. I'm sure you've all seen their new trucks with the picture on it and some random fact about a place in America. These graphics are not only beautiful to look at, but they all have a hidden picture in them too! U-haul's mascot "Sammy U" is hidden somewhere in every Venture Across America picture. This week at work, a U-haul was parked right outside our window and we literally spent the entire day looking for Sammy U! We finally took to Google to help us because we could not find him anywhere. I ended up tweeting the official U-haul Super Graphics account, who messaged the illustrator of the picture, who gave us a clue. We finally found the little guy but it was so faint on this particular truck that we would have never found it without help. Now I have a mission to find Sammy U on every U-haul truck I see!


Here's a picture of what you're looking for:

Sammy U! Named after U-haul's founder, L. S. "Sam" Shoen

Here's the truck that was parked outside work:

Gary and Maddy looking for Sammy U.

We finally spotted him. As you can see, this was incredibly faint and small. But you can see the "U" and in real life (as in not a picture) you could make out Sammy's head and body.

I love this new adventure I now have! Every time I find a U-haul I am going to look for Sammy U!

Here's a video of someone else finding Sammy U which shows him much better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqK3dtK3YxY

I also recently discovered a cool exhibit on the walk to work. On Baltimore, between 13th and 14th, I noticed these markers. Each of them representated a planet in our solar system. It's actually to scale with Pluto at Union Station and the rest of the planets all the way to 13th Street. Just shows you how far out Pluto was (and maybe why it's not considered a planet anymore!)

Each marker had a planet and some facts about them. One interesting fact was it said I was reading the text by light that had left the sun eight minutes ago! Crazy! So, check it out sometime and learn all about our solar system!

Last week, I tried out another burger place on 39th Street, KC Smoke Burgers. This was a very unique experience! When you first walk in, you notice that everything has been written on with markers. It's rather odd. The smell is also very intense. It smells of wonderful smoked burgers!

We all ordered the cheeseburgers and they came out on little individual smokers! Pretty cool.



I really liked how they marked the buns with KC S for KC Smokeburger. The patties were huge and very flavorful. It almost was too much of the smoky flavor. The fries were excellent. One weird thing, no beer! I just found that to be incredibly odd to have a burger joint and no beer. Oh, well!

Found another fountain this week, hidden inside Power and Light at Main at 13th. It's inside the block, right beside Burger King Whopper Bar.

No. 89- Power and Light- block of Main between 13th and 14th



More adventures to come...Laura