TSA, SUV, and BBQ
After driving from Southern California to Las Vegas the afternoon before to meet up with Daniel and enduring a rough night on a regularly deflating air bed, I hoped I hadn’t tried to achieve too much on the first day. We had a morning flight from Las Vegas to Kansas City and a game to get to that evening. Turned out that part was no problem at all.
Our first potential hiccup came when we entered the departure terminal in Las Vegas to print out the luggage tag for Daniel’s suitcase. He really didn’t want to condense everything into a carry-on bag like I had, so we paid for one checked bag. The problem was there had been an enormous music festival in Las Vegas over the weekend and it appeared as though several hundred thousand people planned to fly home the same time we were departing. Though we arrived early enough to get through security before our flight, what we didn’t expect to find (and who would?) was a 3-hour-plus line just to check bags. The math was pretty simple: wait in that line and you’re not making the flight. Heck, it might be landing in Kansas City by the time you check that bag.
There seemed to be only one solution. I mean, we had a plane to catch and a game to get to that night. The itinerary did not make room for flight rescheduling or rainouts. So, we tossed a few larger liquid items into the trash knowing they’d never make it through TSA anyway and decided to get to the gate and take our chances that they’d check the bag when we got there. We didn’t really have a plan B short of buying a carry-on suitcase in the airport and shoving what we could into that. Sometimes a little confidence goes a long way, though. As we approached the TSA officer to enter the security area, he asked us if that bag needed to be checked. We told him we were checking it at the gate. He said as long as it fit on the conveyor belt, that was fine. Long story short, we got through security, found our gate, explained ourselves to the airline staffer at the desk and shortly thereafter watched her wheel his bag away to be checked. I think it was David Letterman who said, it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. Or maybe he said, if you don’t have permission, bring hors d’oeuvres. Regardless, we made the flight with ample time to spare even, and just a hair product and body wash short of the original contents of our luggage.
The Kansas City Chiefs and Royals play in adjoining stadiums that share parking, something I probably should have known in advance.
Our first day began in Las Vegas and took us to Kansas City.
This artistic depiction of George Brett’s hit total is among the exhibits at Kauffman Stadium’s Hall of Fame.
I had to sit down with the great Buck O’Neil and hope he’d whisper one of his famous stories to me.
An exhibit at the Kansas City baseball museum at Kauffman Stadium.
We found fellow Long Game community member and Kauffman Stadium usher Candy Wolfe in her section in the good seats.
We take our first cheesy photo to establish our location just outside Kauffman Stadium.
Frank White Gold Glove display
Frank White statue
Dick Howser statue
George Brett statue
Lifesize Bobby Witt Jr. bobblehead
Royals banners outside the stadium
Bobby Witt Jr at bat
Kauffman Stadium scoreboard
We got into KC, shuttled to the car rental and found our car easily enough. Though I had reserved an economy car (what with the price of gas and all), they had nothing except SUVs on hand so we climbed into our (fancy for me) new Jeep Compass. I drive a car without any center electronic console or other modern bells and whistles, so there were quite a few things to get used to: lane assist (which went on and off randomly over the ensuing few days), a large center navigation panel (a heckuva lot easier to use than my little phone screen that I’ve become acclimated to), and the sort of engine where you don’t even feel it when you step on it. I definitely didn’t want to add a traffic ticket to the trip expenses, but the car tempted me into the occasional high speeds, I must confess.
By now, we still had about 4 hours until game time and hadn’t eaten much breakfast. It was something like lunch time to our two-hours-earlier stomachs, so we headed to the highly recommended and famous (sometimes famous places are more famous than good, of course) Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque. Like complete out-of-towner newbies, we struggled to figure out how to order at their counter and just stood there for several minutes waiting for someone to acknowledge us. Eventually we managed to get an order in: a sampler of pork ribs, brisket, baked potato salad, cole slaw and mac and cheese. Although as we soon realized, we actually got two types of potato salad and no mac and cheese, but we decided to live with it. Everything was really good, we pigged out in the best way possible, and because I was on vacation I even allowed myself the treat of a soda (!). I kept the name-emblazoned plastic cups from the lunch, not really part of a souvenir plan at that point, but I wound up bringing home items from throughout the trip. Better than letting them go into a landfill, right?
Our First Ballgame
We made our way to our hotel, rested for a while, and then headed to Kauffman Stadium to see the visiting Boston Red Sox take on the Kansas City Royals. A veteran of highly extended and sluggish trips into Dodger Stadium, where it can easily take you an hour to get from the freeway to your parking space, I expected to find, you know, traffic. As the navigation took us off the freeway with no one around, I wondered if we’d done something wrong. And as we took a couple quick turns and found ourselves already through the parking kiosk and headed to the lot, I kept thinking it was too good to be true.
I probably should have known this, but it took me by surprise to realize that the Chiefs’ football stadium (it probably has some corporate sponsor name I’m not bothering to look up) is right next door to Kauffman. As in, if both had to play the same day, there was gonna be a major parking problem. I’m sure they have a plan for that. We made our way in and started exploring the ballpark. KC has a great team hall of fame on the outfield concourse that we toured as well as a big kid zone that no doubt makes trips with a family more like a minor-league experience. We were a little old for a merry-go-round, so we checked out the merch shops instead. I do rather like, against my better judgment about the concept in general, the Royals’ new City Connect logo with the fountain. But (spoiler alert) I knew we had a destination the next day where I definitely would grab some merch and wanted to avoid completely destroying my budget on Day 1.
We also managed to find someone there who I kind of knew. Because I had posted about our pre-meetup trip in the Long Game threads, I received a message from Candy Wolfe, who is a longtime usher at Kauffman. She told me what section to find her in, and sure enough we found her right behind home plate on field level just a tad towards first base. Great section to work in! Candy would be joining the weekend meetup, but I couldn’t miss a chance to say hello and check the box of my first meeting with anyone from the LG family. Very cool! (Candy also brought some Royals swag to the meetup for a special needs member of the group, which was doubly – nay, triply – cool.)
When the game started, rather than make our way up high behind home plate to where our seats were, we settled into a near-empty section between third and home on the lower level. No one cared. With just over 14,000 in the park on this Tuesday, there were plenty of great empty seats. Both teams scored in the first inning, and Boston added another in the 2nd, and we thought it would be a high-scoring affair. But then no one scored again until the 8th and Boston erupted for four runs and seven hits in the 9th to win it going away, 7-1.
Who Asked for This?
There was unfortunately something keeping me from truly enjoying the game. Back home in California, hot windy weather produced an early fire season, with a huge one starting the day before in the Simi Valley area and threatening some homes of family members. And then, on the day we flew into KC, the Bain Fire started in the dry riverbed a couple miles from my house. These happen with some regularity and never come anywhere near us, primarily because the fire would have to jump several neighborhoods and catch overmatched firefighters without the ability to be in all the hotspots at once. In 10+ years at the current location, we’d never come anywhere close to real danger …
Until the first day I had gone on a real vacation since early 2020. Of course. And my youngest son was home by himself with animals and no transportation. Still, the fire may have been large and growing, but it really had to cover a lot of ground to get near us. Thankfully we in the region have the Watch Duty app to give us live updates on fire progress and evacuation orders and warnings. So I had my eye on the app with regular alerts, and I was texting with people in the area, some of whom were under evacuation warning already.
And, yeah, this fire kept moving closer and closer until our house was one zone away from an evacuation warning and two away from orders. That meant I needed to plan a way to get my son and the animals out just in case, and I spent several of the middle innings of the game on the phone making arrangements. The zone just to the north of ours went into an evacuation order, and our neighborhood went into the warning area … which meant at any time the alarm could sound to get out. As you might imagine, this grew more and more stressful as the evening wore on, and we solidified an evacuation plan. Imagine me half a continent away, wondering if the day I flew out of the area would be the day a fire got to our house with me powerless to do anything. Not the best way to start a vacation!
By the time I got back to the hotel, I was looking up return flights for the next morning just in case. And I talked my son through packing up a go bag with essential documents and things in the house and giving him a list of a few things to take. He handled it calmly, thankfully, and did everything I could have hoped for. I’m generally a calm person, but I think I would have been losing my mind a little had I been home. I’m certain, having had time to give this a good bit of thought since, that I would have loaded up the trunk with all sorts of things from around the house as I waited on a possible evacuation order. I would have been pacing around looking for more things to save. …
Yet, because I was nowhere nearby and unable to do any of that, I actually felt surprisingly serene. I wasn’t going to send my son rushing around the house to grab this or that. I just accepted that if we lost things, we lost things, and I couldn’t do anything to change it. I probably should have told him to grab the autographed photo of Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese, though. And my one album of reasonably worthwhile baseball cards. Don’t even get me started on some of the books and assorted keepsakes I would put on the list if I ever had to go through this, because it would be a long list. I’ve had a couple weeks to think about it and can’t believe all the things I didn’t tell him to grab!
Anyway, after a night spent trying to sleep while having my phone volume turned up to hear any updates, I awoke to learn the crews had made progress on the fire overnight. Soon they lifted the evacuation warning for our neighborhood and started lifting the outright evacuations in some nearby zones as well. The fire never got super close to us, but we had all seen the previous January in Pacific Palisades and Altadena the danger of flying embers sparking new blazes in multiple areas at once. It will be hard for anyone in SoCal to assume they’ll be fine ever again.
