This spring break, we took the kids on a road trip to a city just a 3.5 hour hop-skip away. Though it’s a fairly big city and crazy close to our St. Louis digs, strangely I’d never been. While our two oldest were bummed that we weren’t going somewhere more luxurious (Our high schooler let us know that our planned trip was pretty lame in comparison to the European jaunts of which his classmates bragged.), we decided to save some dough and keep our holiday fairly local. Kansas City is a pretty place that boasts more fountains than Rome–a fact I doubted when my husband enlightened me. After some ‘sploring, it became clear that this was the case. Who knew this little city in Missouri was so pretty and sophisticated? It also appeared that the city itself was more densely populated than our own. Of course, maybe it’s just the areas I saw.

Having lived my whole life in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, I liken my beloved hometown to a doughnut. Mmm, right? Who doesn’t like doughnuts? What that means is a very small percentage of our metro area’s population live in the actual city, and most people (including my crew) lives in the outer urbs and suburbs. Whenever we entertain out-of-town guests, they’re always amazed at how infrequently we go into the city itself. It’s just a fact of life for most St. Louisans. While we have lots of pride for our city (Go Cards! Go Blues!), it’s just too much of a drive and honestly just not much reason to head downtown. That said, early in the week, we ended up downtown three days in a row! We accompanied cousins who live out of town to The Science Center, our world-famous St. Louis Zoo, and The City Museum, which is a place that always makes me feel extra proud to live here. I’ll let you google it if you fancy, but The City Museum is a three-story building in the middle of the city made almost entirely of recycled industrial and architectural scraps. Seriously, look it up. It’s kind of amazing. Lately, with the dragging winter gloom, I’d been hating on my city a bit. I longed for warmth and sunshine as well as a beach. Since St. Louis is smack-dab in the center of the country, we aren’t very close to any of those. But, and it’s a big but, we do have a pretty awesome town. The food, the friendly people, the sports fans, and of course the free attractions make it a pretty sweet place.

Well, that was an unexpected tangent. I was supposed to be talking about Kansas City, but they’re our rival city and it just felt wrong to do so without first bragging about STL! While in KC, we went to Legoland, the aquarium, the art museum, and the money museum at the Federal Reserve Bank. Tip; buy tickets to Legoland and the aquarium together online and you’ll get a discount on both. While both were really cute, they were much smaller than I expected. You can get through both in an hour or less if you don’t take your time. In KC, we stayed in a hotel with two full-size beds. Yes, one room for all 5 of us. We brought an air mattress for the boys to fight over as well.

In our short stay, I realized something pretty big. I could definitely get used to smaller living quarters. Our home now is plenty spacious, but I actually enjoy being near and spending time with my family. Jeff and I agreed that our next home (we’re not in the market, so purely fantastical) will definitely be smaller. Smaller homes are just easier. Less to maintain, less to clean, and more money saved to spend on more important things.

On the last night of our trip, our youngest child put her arms around both our necks and said “Thank you for taking me to Kansas City! I love you both so much!” In that sweet embrace, she said so much more than she’ll ever know. She let me know that she didn’t need us to go into debt to give her a happy vacation. She enjoyed learning about another city and seeing the sights. While her brothers never did take back their original thoughts about our “lame” vacation, I know they also had a good time. One day, we’ll take them to a beach, and if we work hard and save harder, one day maybe we’ll try to be as cool as their classmates’ parents and take them on a European getaway. I sure hope they don’t hold their breath, though. The beach might have to do..