After crossing Cleveland off our list of major league cities to visit earlier in the summer, we made it to Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City in mid-September.

The Royals were hosting the Seattle Mariners the night we were there. Seattle was a half-game ahead of the Astros in the American League West with only 11 games left in the season, so it was an important game. The Mariners held a late 4-3 lead, but the Royals scored four runs in the bottom of the eighth and eventually won the game by a score of 7-5. It proved to be a temporary setback for the Mariners as they ultimately prevailed as Division champs.

Kauffman Stadium is the fifth oldest big-league park. Opening in 1973, it dates back to the days when Hal McRae still played the outfield. Although it is over 50 years old, the stadium is sparkling clean and beautiful. Its signature feature is a magnificent fountain beyond the outfield wall.

We hit a few other points of interest on our trip. One afternoon we stopped by Lewis & Clark Historic Park at Kaw Point, located at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. The Lewis and Clark Expedition camped there for three days in June 1804, and the park offers a great view of the two rivers and the Kansas City, Missouri skyline.

Kansas City is famous for its barbecue. One of our nephews recommended Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que, which is in Kansas City, Kansas, and according to the sign on the front of their building it is “World Famous.” We loaded up on barbecue pork and brisket, and it was very good. I also had their banana pudding, which features some sort of crunchy toffee topping, for dessert; I enjoyed that at least as much as I did the barbecue.

Kansas City is also home to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which operates two blocks from the Paseo YMCA where Rube Foster established the Negro National League in 1920. The museum is full of memorabilia and artifacts, and they have several films showing footage from Negro League games. It is a must-see attraction for dedicated baseball fans and historians.

We traveled a little over 20 miles south to Belton, Missouri to take a ride on the Belton, Grand View, and Kansas City Railroad. The train ride was a short excursion, only a five-mile roundtrip. The conductor told us that the car we rode in was used in the movie Biloxi Blues in the scene in which Matthew Broderick as Eugene Jerome traveled south to basic training.

We spent half a day at the National World War I Museum and Memorial, which is full of artifacts from all participating nations and features several informational movies with horrifying actual footage of battlefield action. With so much documentation of the horror and cruelty of the Great War, it boggles my mind that over 100 years later, nations still send their young citizens onto the battlefield and still spend so much of their wealth on the weapons and machinery of war.

From the top of the Liberty Memorial Tower in front of the museum we got a grand view of the Kansas City, Missouri skyline where we saw the former corporate headquarters of Western Auto. Growing up in a small town, Western Auto was my go-to retailer for essential supplies ranging from my first baseball glove to bicycle inner tubes to guitar picks.

We now have seen 23 teams at their home ballparks. We still have to make it Boston, Los Angeles (x2), Miami, New York (Mets) Philadelphia, and Toronto to complete our odyssey.