Kansas City, A Labor Day Weekend of War Memorials, Pinball & Sushi
A Labor Day weekend across the state in Kansas City, doing the off-the-beaten-path version: the National WWI Museum, a pay-by-the-hour pinball hall, the Nelson-Atkins shuttlecocks, and our two reliable road-trip rituals, Kura Sushi and that Another Broken Egg French toast.
Kansas City is the easy one, same state, a few hours west on I-70, so we treated it like a relaxed Labor Day weekend and went looking for the off-the-beaten-path version of the city rather than the obvious one.
The WWI Museum on the hill
The anchor of the trip was the National WWI Museum and Memorial, and it’s genuinely one of the best museums in the country that nobody outside the Midwest seems to talk about. It sits on a hill above Penn Valley Park, crowned by the 217-foot Liberty Memorial Tower (there’s an elevator and an observation deck with the KC skyline laid out below). It opened back in 1926, and Congress later made it America’s official WWI museum and memorial, it holds one of the largest collections of First World War material in the world. Sober, enormous, and weirdly moving.
We found the whole place genuinely interesting and fun to walk through, sobering, yes, but absorbing in the way the best museums are. Exactly the kind of stop you’re glad you made time for.
Pinball, the way it should be
Then we did the thing that made the weekend ours: Solid State Pinball Supply, a pay-by-the-hour, all-you-can-play pinball hall (and repair shop) downtown, with machines spanning five decades, old Williams and Bally tables right up to modern Stern and Spooky stuff. There’s no better way to kill an afternoon than unlimited pinball with someone you love and zero quarters required.
We spent a happy stretch just playing pinball together, drifting table to table, the kind of unhurried, low-stakes fun that makes a getaway feel like ours.
Art, shuttlecocks, and the Plaza
We also got the cultured stretch in: the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (free to enter, and famous for the giant shuttlecocks, four eighteen-foot badminton birdies scattered across the lawn like a game frozen mid-swing), right near the Country Club Plaza, the fifteen-block Spanish-architecture shopping district with its towers and fountains. While we were there, the museum had a whole special exhibition devoted to Claude Monet, Monet’s Garden and the Secret Language of Flowers, which was a real treat to wander through.
We kept the art day rolling at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art nearby, another free museum, a short drive away, rounding out a surprisingly art-heavy afternoon for a casual weekend.
The road-trip rituals
Two things are now basically law whenever we travel in the U.S., and KC got both. We went to Kura Revolving Sushi, the conveyor-belt sushi chain we seek out in every American city that has one, a little piece of Japan on demand. And we tracked down Another Broken Egg Cafe to have the Cinnamon Roll French Toast again, the exact thing we’d fallen for back in Destin in 2023. It was just as fantastic the second time. Some discoveries you don’t let go of; you just chase them around the map.
Our own wheels, and a loud night
Because KC is a straight shot across our own state, we drove and had our own car the entire time, which meant total freedom to bounce wherever we wanted, museum to pinball to sushi, entirely on our own schedule. We stayed at the Hotel Westport Kansas City (Tapestry Collection by Hilton), right in the thick of things, which came with one catch: it was very noisy. A lively location is always a bit of a double-edged thing.
The takeaway
No grand agenda, no flights, no jet lag, just a long, easy weekend across our own state, built out of the things we actually love: a great museum, unlimited pinball, conveyor-belt sushi, and a French toast worth a four-hour drive. Sometimes the best trips are the ones in your own backyard, done exactly your way.