Anyone can be a restaurant reviewer in Johnson County. I like reviews from this guy: he works, he eats, he complains. Once in awhile a man has to go back to his hunting roots, he has to procure his food in danger, surrounded by hostile environment and hard-to-find parking. That’s when I get out and go to the Independence Ave. to look for new lunch spots. There is probably not a day goes by without this area being in the news in connection to drugs, murders or prostitution. TV reporters spend so much time freezing in the street with their live reports which occur at least 12 to 24 hours after the event that they would be better off just renting an apartment and looking out of the window.
On the other hand, some of the most unique, authentic and cheap places to eat are located there, albeit with metal bars on the windows. Last week I ate at El Michoacano Taqueria (listen) which is a small family-owned restaurant. I ordered three tacos from the menu below: Carne Asada, Lengua and Chorizo. They were very tasty and they even gave me a lime to go which was a nice touch. The salsa was authenticated and approved by a Mexican co-worker. It’s not a chopped-up tomato salsa you normally see in a majority of Mexican Restaurants, theirs it real thin but flavorful and hot.
If you don’t speak Spanish please know that Lengua is tongue, Birria means goat, Tripitas is Tripe and Buche is some kind of internal part of a pig. While I enjoy a Lengua taco once in awhile (STFU Chimpo!), don’t blame me if you unknowingly eat a goat.
If you are not afraid of drive-by’s and/or mugging please try this restaurant.

Everyone in this town knows about this, even people like me, who came here years after it happened.

The Hyatt Regency hotel walkway collapse was a collapse of a walkway that occurred on July 17, 1981, in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, killing 114 people and injuring 216 others during a tea dance. At the time, it was the deadliest structural collapse in U.S. history.

Just a few pages from the Kansas City Times and Kansas City Star issues in the days after the accident (should be mostly readable if clicked).

This post should be titled “I have a camera too, you know…”. There are people in this town who are really good at taking pictures, and then there is me. I don’t set an aperture and exposure on my camera, I just push the button. That doesn’t make me any less eager to share my photos. Plus I have better captions.

I’ve always wanted to drive along the Pacific Coast. Many times at work I would look at the breathtaking images taken from the California State Route 1 and make a mental note to make it there, so I can add my own photographs to the enormous pile that already exists. So as soon as we got off the train we proceeded to rent a car and spend the next 36 hours exploring the Coast, Monterey, Big Sur an everything in between. We returned the car the 450 miles later, 450 miles of the best-looking scenic drive in the country. Even though we had to hurry through the area pressed by the vacation plans, we weren’t disappointed. We drove through a cloud, ate ice cream in Santa Cruz, spent a night in Monterey where we visited the Cannery Row and the best Aquarium in the country, stopped to take photos of elephant seals and a waterfall. But most of all it was about enjoying the view and loving the ride.

On the unrelated note, cars that don’t use ignition keys are highly overrated and annoying. I hope it’s not a trend.

On my rare visit to Barnes and Noble, a store that encourages consumer to buy books online, I discovered a new batch of books containing vintage photos of Kansas City and other nearby places of interest. While I admire the effort to collect and annotate enough historic photos for a book, I don’t see myself paying over $20 for one of them. I am afraid many of these will be read at the coffee shop upstairs.

Luckily there are plenty of old photos online to entertain a cheap person like myself and even some books that can be read and downloaded for free. For example, check out A Birthday Book Of Kansas City 1821-1921 by Charles Phelps Cushing (obviously you should do it at work). The following photos and captions are taken from this book.