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Last night Jeremy and I decided to throw caution to the wind, leave the boys with a baby-sitter, and drive to Kansas City to attend a concert of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square.

I think I could come back here in 20 years and make the drive to Kansas City and automatically on the drive my heartbeat would begin to speed up and my blood pressure would start to rise. It's just that almost everytime we make the drive we are "late" and hoping we get to the airport or wherever else on time, so I spend the whole drive sitting in the passenger seat stressing.

Before we left last night we took a moment, as we watched our parents do when we were children, to say a special prayer of protection and safety for our long drive. I took the liberty--since I was the one voicing the prayer--to pray that "the tides might be with us" on our drive. I don't know how doctrinally sound that request was, but in the end we made great time, and I was grateful to not have to stress as much as usual.

The concert was in the Sprint Center in downtown Kansas City.


The concert was beautiful, fun, and uplifting. Music has always been significant in both mine and Jeremy's lives, and the concert was as enjoyable as we hoped it would be. We "jumped ship" a song before the end in order to beat the exit crowds--we had a 2 hour drive home after all.

When we left the concert and were walking back to our car we were feeling good from our fun, and we could hear the party going on inside the Power and Light District. I said to Jeremy, "See this is why we want to live in the city."

He agreed, then we stopped to ask one of the police men how to get back on the 670 going "west towards Topeka." His directions pointed us back to the same place we had exited the freeway, so we logically followed them.

Except there was a detour- because something was set up in the street by the convention center.

So we detoured. And then circled three times around the three-block off-ramp area that we had come in on-where the police officer had directed us to. There was a sign for going east, a sign for going north and a sign for going south. Finally on the fourth time around we decided to get on the 35 going south, get off on the first exit to turn around and get back on going north and hopefully find an interchange to westbound 670.

But of course the exit we chose didn't have a corresponding on-ramp so we had to drive way further down into "scary town" until we found a way back on the freeway going north, and then successfully found the interchange to the 670.

(If you think that was annoying to read about, imagine driving it instead, all the while stressing about how each minute you spend wandering around is another minute past midnight that your babysitter will be sitting at your house trying not to fall asleep, and then throw in some stress in there for wondering whether or not the boys ever even fell asleep for the babysitter or not--because they sure haven't been falling asleep for us lately).

By the time we were back safely on the 70 headed home, I was ready to say to Jeremy, "See this is why we don't want to live in the city!"