A Week In and Around Kansas City

travel dates: June, 2025

We tend to like midwestern cities a lot. And we had never spent much time in Kansas City before. But still, we would not have devoted an entire week of our summer trip to Kansas City were it not for AP exams. Backstory: Dave is an AP Calc teacher and has spent a few summers doing AP grading for some extra money/insight into the AP exam to help with his teaching. He’s always done online for various reasons (travel, covid, etc), but was hoping to do it in person last summer. Online AP grading is kind of a drag, but in person you get to stay in a hotel and hang out with colleagues and all that sort of thing. So we planned our entire itinerary around the week AP grading was happening in Kansas City. And then…he was offered online grading instead. Boo! Stupid College Board. But they don’t tell you that until you’ve, say, already booked a campground near Kansas City for a week.

So, basically, that’s the story of how we spent a week in a campground outside of Kansas City last summer while Dave sat in the trailer grading AP exams on the computer.

And then Abe got sick while we were there and we had van trouble (specifically, one of the windows stopped working and was stuck open, so driving it into the city before we could get that fixed seemed like a bad idea), so we didn’t even do as much in KC as we were hoping.

But we did a lot! I will tell you about it!

(Incidentally, this summer’s trip had more long stops than usual AND I’m so far behind that I’m likely going to be doing fewer but longer posts about it than usual. Like I’m going to fold the campground review in here. And when I get to Denver I’m planning a MASSIVE single guide to Denver type post because we’ve now been there three times AND I can enlist Ari’s help in adding other things, too).

Blue Springs Campground

We considered a few different options for campgrounds near Kansas City but ultimately went with Blue Springs Campground, a county-run campground near Lee’s Summit, Missouri and 17 miles from downtown KC. We were very happy with the spacious, well-maintained sites and modern, clean facilities. We paid just under $50/night for our full hook up site. There are two big loops at the campground with all long back-in sites. Our site was gravel, but they also have very nice sites with concrete pads for $10 more/night.

The sites are very spacious, though most of them are fairly open and grassy, so not necessarily a ton of privacy. And also not a lot of shade, which was a little sad since it was very hot while we were there. A couple of other things to note: I was nervous when we pulled up to our site (#41) because the entrance was very sloped. However, we got into it fine and had no trouble leveling once were all the way in. Dave fretted a little during out stay that hitching back up would be tricky, but it turned out to be fine.

And, finally, the only way out of the campground is through the same driveway as the two dump stations, so if people were using both of them you might be stuck for awhile. But this didn’t happen to us. Oh, lastly, there was no soap in the bathrooms! We ran into this at a few different places on this trip, and it was kinda weird. Not like the soap was empty, it just wasn’t there. So, you know, bring your own soap if you use the bathhouse. Overall, we were happy with our choice: good location for getting into the city, and we also liked being close to Lee’s Summit, which is a fun little town with plenty of restaurants/shopping/etc. It’s also only about 15 minutes from Independence, MO, where we spent a day learning a great deal about Harry Truman, as you’ll soon see.

(This would end up being Fiesta the Beagle’s last trip, so Im probably going to put in every picture of her I see for the rest of these posts):

Oh, there’s also the actual lake, of course, and many people in the campground were clearly there to take advantage of that. We did drive over there to do a short hike one evening, but I remember it mostly as buggy and hot–it’s definitely boating that’s the bigger draw than hiking here. In fact, I seem to have taken all of one picture, I think from the parking lot where we started the hike:

Okay, I checked my notes and remembered that the real reason we disliked this hike was because the dogs got a bunch of ticks here! And also this is where our window broke.

Lee’s Summit

Downtown Lee’s Summit was less than 15 minutes away from the campground, so we went into town a few times for meals and just hanging out and found that we liked it a lot. We ate at and can recommend Third Street Social (where the cheese biscuits are excellent) and Smoke Brewing Co (which has great bbq in addition to beer). We also bought books at the Well Read Bookstore:

…played skee-ball and Ms. PacMan at Arcade Alley (which only allows kids before 7, FYI):

…and ate some ice cream and drank coffee at Poppy’s:

Missouri Town Living History Museum

Missouri Town was our destination of choice the day our van window was stuck open and we didn’t want to park it on the mean streets of KC (the streets of KC were actually perfectly nice to us, but still…seemed like asking for trouble. It was only a 20 minute drive from our campground and we all know that love living history!

Well. I’m sure that Missouri Town is great on a more bustling type of day, but the day we went it was a ghost town–i.e. not much living in the living history. The lone interpreter was a not very chatty blacksmith. I think we saw one other family visiting the whole time we were there. It was just us and sheep:

So without any staff to tell us about stuff or wear cool costumes for us, it was pretty much just peering into a collection of old buildings and not really knowing what we were looking at a lot of the time. Also it was very hot.

Yeah, so. I could see this being a good excursion with very young kids if it’s a nice day and they like sheep and open spaces for running around. Or, I’m sure, when things are more lively and there’s more staff around. But it was a miss for us. There were, however, very nice wildflowers on the drive there:

Independence, MO

Longtime blog readers will know that we try not to pass up a chance to see a President’s house (although I should confess here that we have now driven by the Eisenhower boyhood home in Kansas four times without stopping, mostly for reasons of dogs in trailers and hot days). We were staying just a few minutes from the Harry Truman Library and Museum and Historic Site in Independence, MO, so of course we planned to spend a day there.

And we spent all day there.

This worked out pretty well, because Dave needed to get AP grading done, so he came with us but skipped the presidential library part and found a coffee shop to work at and then met up with us for lunch and the historic site/home tour later.

I don’t think most people spend all day doing Harry Truman stuff in Independence, but this is often my favorite kind of touring. I love getting to do the deep dive parts of a site that not many people get to, and I love not feeling rushed or like we’re missing anything. I have fond memories of our trip to Green Gables Heritage Place on Prince Edward Island, where we did every scheduled program and hung out so long that we met two different Annes.

But then of course sometimes you run up against a situation where it seems like there will be a ton to do and then…not so much.

Fortunately, the Truman Library and Museum is ginormous! We went there in the morning and spent a couple of hours, didn’t get through nearly everything, and decided to go back for more in the afternoon.

We thought the museum was super well done and utterly fascinating. Truman was alive when it was built and you can see his office where he worked six days a week:

And of course there’s the obligatory Oval Office recreation:

And, of course, one of history’s most famous newspapers:

But also lots of new-to-us information (honestly, Truman isn’t one of the presidents I knew a ton about before this trip). We learned a lot about his courtship with and marriage to Bess. Best story: Harry Truman wrote more than 1000 letters to Bess over the years, and most of his letters to her survive. But there are very few of her letters to him left around, at least partially because she appears to have wanted it that way. As the story goes, Harry walked in on Bess burning some of the letters and was quite upset. “Think of history!” he exclaimed. She calmly replied, “Oh, I have,” and went on burning the letters.

The museum doesn’t gloss over the darker and more complicated parts of Truman’s life/presidency. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is given a lot of real estate in a non-defensive way with plenty of room for nuance and complexity (I was also very surprised to read about just how little inside information Truman had about the plans as vice president, even though everyone pretty much knew that FDR was in very poor health and that Truman was likely to need to step up).

There’s a fascinating interactive game about the Red Scare; I did better than the kid owing to my superior knowledge about the Red Scare:

You also get a good sense of Harry Truman as a person, including his really stellar taste in vacation apparel:

At the end, you get to pick out your favorite Harry S. Truman quotation:

Also the gift shop sells (or at least sold) Museum Nerd mugs!

The other big Truman-themed thing to do in Independence is visit the NPS historic site and tour the home that Harry and Bess lived in both before and after the White House. The visitor center is downtown, but there’s not really a lot going on inside as far as exhibits go. It is, however, where you have to go to reserve (free, but limited and first come, first served) house tour tickets. And of course it’s where you pick up and return your Junior Ranger book:

The house is a few blocks away (there’s another house that’s part of the NPS site across the street; it belonged to…someone in the family and has exhibits inside). The only way to see the Truman house is on a 30 minute small group guided tour. No pictures inside the house, but it’s a charming place–the Trumans were always frugal and lived a very modest life post-presidency, and the house reflects that. Lots of anecdotes about Harry and Bess from our knowledgable tour guide. Also, there was one guy who could not stay on the clearly marked walkway and kept setting off alarms all over the place, which was sort of hilarious.

We ate lunch at the Courthouse Exchange, which boasts of having been serving burgers since 1899:

Arabia Steamboat Museum

The Arabia Steamboat Museum is a kind of weird and interesting place that I’m not going to spend much time talking about because it’s closing permanently next month, as I’m writing this. (Word is they’re looking for a new location to move to, but no luck with that yet). So back in the late 80’s the family that started the museum got fixated on excavating the Arabia Steamboat that sank near Kansas City in 1856. It was a massive effort and telling the story of the excavation is a big focus of the museum. The contents of the steamboat–largely merchandise that had been headed to shops in frontier towns–is on display in the museum as well.

We found the story of this sort of…obsessive and expensive quest to unearth the steamship (and then the subsequent decision to put everything in a museum) more compelling than the steamboat itself. It’s just a specific and strange vanity project. But overall it was one of my favorite kinds of tourist stops: something unique to a particular destination, something you’re not going to find anywhere else. I’ll take an Arabia Steamboat Museum over another science museum (much as I love a good science museum) any day. So I hope it finds somewhere to land!

Kansas City Central Library Tour

I don’t remember how I stumbled across the fact that the Central branch of the Kansas City Public offers tours, but I do remember that I jumped at the chance to take one, because libraries are awesome. See?

This looks like a super historic building, and it IS, but it’s only been a library since 2004. It started life as the First National Bank in 1904, which explains both all that expensive marble and how there’s a vault in the basement (used for movie screenings today). Tragically, we didn’t get to go in the vault during our tour because it was closed for a private event:

It looks like they don’t have a regular schedule of public tours right now, but you can request one possibly. But even if you don’t get to go on an official guided tour, I definitely recommend checking out the building and doing a self-guided version–I’m pretty sure everything we saw was open to the public.

The marble comes from Georgia, so we felt right at home:

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

The Nelson-Atkins is one of those grand old institutions that reminds us that the midwest does this kind of thing really, really well. It’s a world class museum, with a beautiful building and grounds, a stunningly impressive art collection….and it’s FREE!

It’s one of those huge museums y0u could get lost in, so that’s more or less what we did: wandered around finding cool stuff without much of a plan.

We bought a Christmas ornament of this shuttlecock. At first, my little rule-followers weren’t sure they were allowed to touch the grass:

But there were no signs, ropes, etc. so I convinced them it was okay:

Incidentally, this is the day August left us; after the museum we took him to the airport to fly to Colorado for a summer of French horn playing in the Rockies. But me made sure he got his fill of art first:

Maybe even too much art:

Also this is probably the prettiest cafe we’ve ever eaten at:

And that concludes our tour of the KC area! Next up: the long drive across Kansas and finally making it to Colorado!