This last weekend, John and I drove to Kansas City for Age of Steam Con. I’ve talked about the convention before, when I went in 2019 (Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3), and was thrilled that the timing worked out for me to make it again. This will likely be a little bit of a travelog, a bit of map overviews and impressions of what I played, some food coverage, and ramblings about why it is such a brilliantly executed convention.

Kansas City is a long drive, and the distance is at the awkward spot for me where I’m torn between flying and driving, but I let the driving win-out for a number of reasons, such as what I’m able to pack and where I’m able to stop.

We took off around 6 AM, as while I don’t plan out all of my meals and what not when travelling, I do a bit of research to locate the top-tier bakeries in the area, and for this trip, we’d need to be in Indianapolis by 8 AM – and no sooner as we’d be waiting for it to open.

This trip’s bakery of choice was Amelia’s. It’s just down the street from Milktooth, my previous bakery stop of choice in the area, and while it doesn’t have an espresso machine or restroom (those are available at a coffee shop next door), it does have a small grocery area – with fresh local persimmons – and a homemade gelato selection I had not been prepared for.

I grabbed a kouign amann, which I’ll never be able to pronounce, a cinnamon roll, and a chocolate chip cookie. I ate one right away, another at our first pit stop, and took bites of the cookie here and there during the drive. As is the case most times I see it on a menu, the kouign amann hit the spot.

It was a midwestern U.S. road trip, complete with small town quirkiness. I had an envelope I needed to mail to California, and while I was leaving before my local post office would be open, I figured it wouldn’t be much trouble to mail it along the way, and, well, it’d be a little closer to California when I mailed it!

Fortuitously, somewhere in the middle of Illinois we saw a billboard for The World’s Largest Mailbox, and so we stopped off in Casey, IL to experience the joy of The World’s Largest….lots of things: tacos, knitting needles, rocking chair, wind chimes, mousetrap, and more. While we couldn’t _mail_ the envelope in the world’s largest mailbox, we could climb up in it, and there was a post office just around the corner (on the other side of The World’s Largest Birdcage).

We had other distractions to break up the drive too. Mattel has recently released an intriguing set of “escape room” games, Isabel and Kira. We’ve talked about some of their “Escape Room in a Box” releases in the past, and while the puzzles are a just a tad easy, they have a lot of _fun_ in them, through both the puzzles and the physical mechanisms. While I’m fairly jaded on Exit and Unlock now, this is the series I currently look forward to the most.

So what’s new here? Well, it’s broken into two boxes. You can get one box. Your friend can get the other. When you’re finished, you can video chat to solve an extra set of puzzles that uses a little from one box and a little from the other. This drive was on a Thursday, a day one of my weekly groups usually meets, and so we talked to the folks at Mattel and they recommended we might be able to do one of the boxes while driving. John would read or describe the puzzle, and I would keep my eyes on the road, and together we made a bit of progress – though one puzzle he saved for me until a lunch stop where I could responsibly do it while not also trying to drive.

When we got to our lodging in Kansas City, we set up a call with Dale and worked through the joint puzzles, as he had done his box earlier in the week. Both the individual box and the joint puzzles were a lot of fun, and I imagine we’ll have a full review of them up soon.

We made a few other stops along the way, a bookstore, a game store, a detour to see the arch in St. Louis, and learned a bit about what was going on around us – such as Missouri’s peculiar state-route lettering system. One town’s largest road side attractions were a prison and an inexplicable chamber of commerce sign in front of it that said if you lived here, you’d be home by now.

But it was a drive that was over sooner than a clock would’ve implied, and we headed to the site of the con, a 163 acre retreat center with cabins of various sizes, camp sites, some creeks, hiking trails, and plenty of deer. We play in the brown building below, and the white buildings off to the right are some of the smaller cabins available.