Lucky for me, this week has been full of free food festivities. Last Friday night, Chad and I were volunteers at Treads and Threads, the huge benefit for the cancer center at the KU Hospital, held at Kansas Speedway. We enjoyed a variety of food from 23 of Kansas City's best restaurants before spending our two hour shift driving golf carts, which is actually a really fun job! We'd done it a couple of years ago and had a great time, so we got our friend Vikkie, who is the volunteer coordinator for the event, to sign us up again for this "shuttle" service, where we drive people to and from their cars in the parking lot when they arrive and when they're leaving. I loved flying around in those golf carts with the wind whipping through my hair on a cool September evening! Several of my passengers commented that they thought my ride was more fun than the ride they'd taken in the pace car! The only bad thing is that our shift was right in the middle of the event, so we missed the entertainment for the evening, which was Hootie and the Blowfish. We're not huge fans, but it still would have been kind of fun to see them. The fireworks show was also pretty amazing after the show, but I could only see about half of it because part of the time while I was driving it was behind me!
On Wednesday, we had another opportunity for some free food--this time without even having to do any work! Chad received several tickets from Westar for the annual Taste of Lawrence mixer put on by the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce. Attendees get to sample tons of food from 27 area restaurants, and get to socialize with about 1700 fellow Lawrencians. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, which made for a very enjoyable evening!
Last night, there was another Lawrence Chamber of Commerce event in downtown Lawrence, fittingly dubbed "Get Downtown." It was basically just a big block party at which several bands played, with several food and drink vendors. Admission was free, so the street was pretty much packed with people. Some friends from work told me about the event, one of whom gave me some VIP passes to get into a more exclusive gathering at a downtown bank, where we enjoyed--you guessed it--some free food! :) There weren't too many snacks to choose from, and Chad's picky tastes weren't interested in the street vendors, so after having some appetizers at the bank we headed a few doors down to a new restaurant called Global Cafe. We had some really great sandwiches and would totally recommend it!
After some dinner we headed back down to the block party to watch the headliners of the show, a cover band called $ell Out! who are apparently pretty popular in the area. They just do cover songs from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and each of the 8+ people in the band dress as one of their favorite music icons. While they weren't really spectacular musicians (although one of the female singers did have an amazing voice), their set was a lot of fun because just about everyone in the crowd knew all of the songs! I thought it was tons of fun!
This is kind of an aside to the real topic of this blog, but I was trying to look online at the Lawrence Journal-World to find pictures of these two big events of the week, which
entertained several thousand people between them. The J-W managed to come up with only one picture of each event, neither of which was very representative of the event itself. There wasn't even an article about Get Downtown in the online J-W at all today, and this was the only picture they published taken at the event. KU didn't really have anything to do with the event, so I'm slightly confused about this picture, and slightly baffled at the fact that you could have thousands of people at a concert in the middle of the main area of town and not do some sort of news story about it!
5 comments:
Kim. Chad. Seriously, we wish we wouldn't have read this particular blog entry. You know us. If there's anything we love more than free beer, it's free food. And Lawrence. And you two. And we missed it all. We miss it ALL! We are sad and jealous right now. Where was this fabled "Taste of Lawrence" last year? We would have been there. Heavens to Betsy. ;)
Okay, this is your mother speaking...I learn more about you in your blog than I ever knew...free food...What fun...but you really earned it in a million ways..love you
Heavens to Betsy is right, I am not a picky eater! As long as it is American(ish) food prepared in a sterile environment, with no olives,
tomatoes, pesto, curry or other freaky spices, no salt please, just right on the temperature, certainly almost no pink for the meat, and yes, I just asked for BBQ sauce with my steak - am I eating this or you? OK then, mind your own business, seafood is rarely tasty, ditto for Chinese (except King Buffet), Greek food is, well, nasty, Italian is OK if you drown it in sauce, no dark beer, soup is kind of a waste of a meal, veggie burger - that just sounds gross, really hard toast is no good, I have no use for fried chicken, pepperoni pizza=no thanks, eggs often hurt my fragile stomach, any ketchup but Heinz should be outlawed, and please do not ask if I would like chocolate or coffee, or I may throw up in my mouth.
I forgot tuna!!! Yuck. Fish in a can? Think about it.
Chad, I think you just wrote a new children's book entitled, "And you think YOU'RE a Picky Eater!" You read it to kids ages 3-6 and then tell them that hey, their parents could have it worse than a menial broccoli or veg dislike...they could have CHAD! ;)
Your post made me laugh out loud!!!!!!! I didn't know there were so many black list foods...just restaurants. I stand corrected.
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