Two days in a row, due to customer meetings and personal travel, I’ve had to wake up at 4am for early morning flights that depart at 6:30am. I originally planned to take a late morning flight back to New York from Orlando, but because I had to connect, it would have wasted too much time, and I’d have less time to do all the work that’s been piling up in my email inbox. So I opted for an early morning return to be more efficient.

The crappy part about changing flights within 24 hours is that the picking of seats is limited, plus the chance of getting upgraded to business or first class based on my level of status is probably not going to be great because other people would have already been confirmed for upgrades. And I found out exactly how important it was to have TSE pre-check in Orlando during spring break: the regular security line at the Orlando airport was so long that I couldn’t even see the beginning of it when I arrived at the airport; the TSE pre-check line had 2 people before me when I arrived. If I didn’t have TSE pre-check, there was no way I would have made my flight in time, even with an hour arrival before flight departure.

On our final day in Kansas City, we drove a little outside the city to visit a grass-fed sheep’s milk cheese creamery in Weston, Missouri. I had read about it in some travel and food blogs when doing trip research for this weekend, and so we made a booking for a tour of the grounds, which ended in a cheese and local grape varietal wine tasting.

The comical thing about coming here and taking Chris and his parents to this is that in Australia, pretty much all dairy is grass-fed; there’s no novelty about it. It’s what is considered normal and what is practiced. Every time I go there, the milk always, always tastes better than the average milk that we buy here, even organic. It doesn’t matter if the milk or organic or not. What that means it that if you are drinking “organic milk, your cows are likely just getting organic grain and corn. It’s still corn they’re eating, which isn’t normal. What really matters is whether the cows are eating grass, what they are naturally supposed to be eating. They are what they eat.

Chris’s dad, who really doesn’t know much about food at all (when I tell him I like to make things from scratch and don’t like brownie or pancake mixes, he has absolutely no idea what I mean when I say a “mix”), even said that grass-fed dairy was the norm in Australia and New Zealand, so he didn’t quite get why this place was notable. “I suppose that in Australia, this place would no longer have its shtick, right?” he asked. Yes, he’s right. This stupid country.

The last two days have been a bit of an education both in regional Kansas barbecue, and in American history. When I look back at the textbooks that I read on American history, particularly around slavery, race, and civil rights, I always feel as though so much of it was glossed over, and many areas that could have gone deeper just aren’t given the time or the textbook paragraph space.

We visited the Brown vs. Board of Education national historical site today on our way back to Kansas City from Abilene, Kansas, which is where the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum is. Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the handful of major Supreme Court cases that we learned in school, but what I do not remember being told or taught was that after the ruling, many states actually rebelled against it, going so far as to shutting down their schools and entire school districts to prevent desegregation from happening. It just sounded so full of hate and selfishness; there’s really no other way to put it. It happened everywhere from Arkansas to Virginia. We knew from learning about the Little Rock Nine that communities and individuals were against whites and blacks having the same rights and going to the same schools, but for entire cities’ school districts to just shut down to make a statement just seems so unfair to literally everyone living in these areas.

Maybe that’s why so many people believe that racism doesn’t exist, that there’s no difference in treatment between a white or a brown or a black person. Maybe that’s the reason insanities like Fox News exist. It’s because the way rulings like Brown vs. Board of Education are taught do not delve deeper into the aftermath of the rulings. They don’t drill into the injustices that continued to happen day after day when major decisions like this are made. They don’t make the connection between those times and what we are experiencing today. They make it seem as though these decisions or laws swept away all the bad, and everyone just lived happily ever after since then. That isn’t the case. It wasn’t the case then, and it also still isn’t the case now. The amount of ignorance in this country around our own history is just so saddening. Even when I think about myself, I still believe I learned more about U.S. history visiting presidential libraries and these historical sites over anything I learned in school. And I supposedly went to the “better” schools in San Francisco, too, so I’m not sure what that’s saying about the quality of schools in America in general.

When Chris’s parents come to town, we usually take them on a side trip somewhere for a weekend, and this year, we chose Kansas City. It’s an interesting city in that it belongs to both Missouri and Kansas, and because neither of us had been to Kansas before, it was another state to tick off the list (42 for me, and 44 for Chris). It’s driving distance from both the Truman and the Eisenhower presidential library and museums, and it’s also an American barbecue capital, one that we hadn’t yet had the chance to enjoy until today.

We chose to go to Joe’s Kansas City, as it was the most popular and has been rated one of the best, if not the best, barbecue restaurant in the country. Even though it was a Friday, there was still a bit of queue (a local told me that this was far shorter than usual), and so we lined up. They’re known for their beef ribs and “burnt ends” especially, and pretty much all of their sides. Burnt ends are “the thing” in Kansas City, and it’s rumored that each barbecue restaurant has their own “style” of how to make them. We ordered the beef ribs, brisket, and the burnt ends, along with spicy slaw, potato salad, dirty rice, and baked beans.

Chris and I have been fortunate to have gone to pretty much every major barbecue region in the country, and before this trip, our shared favorites were by far Texas style barbecue, and then North Carolina barbecue. One of our least favorites was actually in the state of Missouri, in St. Louis; the meat didn’t have much flavor at all, and all the focus seemed to be on the sauces… which is great, but if I’m going to eat barbecue which is supposed to take hours and hours to cook, I want really good meat first, not really good sauce. Who eat barbecue just for the sauce and not the meat, anyway? But now that we’ve had this barbecue, I can safely say that this is probably my second favorite barbecue now. The ribs were some of the best and most flavorful ribs I’ve had; they weren’t fall of the bone tender, but a good cross of fall-of-the-bone with just a bit of bite. The rub on them was also really smokey and complex. Every side we ordered was memorable.

Kansas City is impressive. I’m still salivating over those ribs and the burnt ends.