Kansas City – in Kansas – on a Saturday night. We headed off to Legends, a vast shopping mall built around a racetrack and sportsfields. An island building in the huge carpark, Cheeseburger in Paradise was our destination. There were thirty hungry BookCrossers to be fed. Just one of those convention meals that arise. You know how it goes.

“Say, where we all eating tonight?”

“Anywhere you want, honey.”

“We thought we’d ask a local. Like you.”

“Well, there’s this cheeseburger place that’s kind of fun. There’s a Books-A-Million branch nearby…”

“I’m sold!”

And before you know it, half the convention is joining you for dinner and you need a whole bunch of tables.

The song

I’ve been listening to Jimmy Buffett since the 1980s. His bouncy ballads of island life and margaritas and sailing and just lazing about have hit my buttons. Perfect for conjuring up a different lifestyle when your own is full of grey clouds and storms. He’ll have you smiling by the end of the first track, tapping your toes in the second, and if you haven’t got a party going with jugs full of cold drinks halfway through the album, you’re in serious trouble.

Cheeseburger in Paradise is a typical bit of Buffett fluff. It sold about a bazillion copies, and it describes the perfect meal for a sailor finishing a cruise where the only food left aboard is peanut butter and beans. This is the meal Jimmy was dreaming about:

…at night I’d have these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat
Not zucchini, fettucini, or bulgar wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat

Cheeseburger in paradise
Heaven on earth with an onion slice
Medium rare with mustard’d be nice
Not too particular, not too precise
I’m just a cheeseburger in paradise

I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draught beer
Well, good god Almighty which way do I steer?

The plate

I stuck to the Jimmy Buffett prescription exactly. Apart from the medium rare part. I don’t hold with minced meat being anything less than cooked all the way through. Fine for a steak to be pink inside, but with mince, some of the original surface could be in the middle of the pattie. You want any germs that may have been on the surface to be well and truly cooked out.

I was also driving, so I swapped out the cold draft beer for a mug of root beer. Well, it’s beer, innit?

Whatever, the meal was one to dream about, and one to remember fondly forever. You can bet every time I hear that song, I’ll be back in Kansas City!

The burger was superb, the service smiling and perky from some young thing who looked like she’d just come from her day job as a waitress at a tropic beach resort, and the atmosphere was good fun, the decor themed down to Hawai’ian labels on the restrooms. Windsurfers, palms, sails and shells. Food and drinks to match. I loved it. It was perfect.

The place

We were staying in Overland Park at the DoubleTree, and there’s actually another Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant closer to the hotel, but we went off to Legends. I plugged the closer one into the GPS just to make sure if we lost the car we were following, and all the way there the GPS would tell us to do a u-turn and it was “Recalculating, dammit”. I was certain that the people ahead had made a serious mistake and we’d eventually have to turn around and go all the way back, late for dinner.

Quite a drive, and I was lost after about the sixth big highway! It was a relief to find a park and see the big neon sign, with a platoon of hungry BookCrossers outside.

Books-A-Million at Legends

The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel

This was also the place where I discovered Maurice Sendak, reading his Where the Wild Things Are to Discoverylover, and being arterly charmed.

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The BookCrossing

BookCrossing is this crazy American idea where you go to the BookCrossing.com website, enter some details about your book, get an ID number which you write on the book (usually on a label which gives instructions) and then release it “into the wild” on a park bench, a coffeeshop table, on a cable car…

Or in this case, into one of the many fountains in Legends in Kansas City. Here’s Discoverylover from New Zealand setting one free:

There is nothing quite like getting a bunch of BookCrossers together and doing crazy stuff, just giving books away!

–Skyring

Resources

• The restaurant website
• The Wikipedia entry for the song
• The Wikipedia entry for the restaurant chain

Christmas Day and Boxing day were days of sloth and slumber. We had a duck for our Christmas dinner. Not a huge success, but we enjoyed ourselves anyway. These days when the whole family is together are precious. We have varying timetables, DS in particular is beginning to show signs of flying the nest, and well, it’s kind of sad to think that our little family will one day soon no longer be together under one roof.

But of course, when that happens, it means that it will one day be a larger family and there will be fresh joys.

On the Sunday, we drove up to my sister’s place at Gosford, where we had another family dinner. DS staid behind for this one, so it was Kerri, DD and I driving four hours up and four back. Good to see sister, b-i-l, two nephews, and Mum. Mum is increasingly frail. She’s having heart surgery within the month and her days of living alone in her cottage in Rockhampton are probably numbered. If not ended.

Canberra pretty much goes to sleep between Christmas Eve and Australia Day. The government shuts down, the students and the cadets disappear, the local paper features pages of news from the South Coast where half of the public service summer in shacks on the beach. And cabbies cool their heels in the heat.

Yeah, it’d be a great time to go travelling, except there’s nothing happening in the world of BookCrossing, it’s hot on this side of the Equator and freezing on the other. No thanks!

New Years Eve and the three days following were days of idleness and sleep. I spend a lot of time sleeping, it seems, but realistically I’m just catching up, given the lack of slumber during my normal work routine. A couple of hours here and there – that’s it for me on a weekday.

Last night I took Kerri out for dinner. A hot day and I didn’t really feel like the salt and pepper squid that was on the menu. Besides, I’d have to help cook it. I could see that Kerri was looking forward to it as much as I. So I suggested dinner at the local (airconditioned) restaurant. We got in the car – yeah it’s about two minutes’ walk, but so hot and sunny that Kerri balked – and found the place closed. So we off to Manuka. I saw TX18 idling on the rank, and popped my head in to smile at my weekend driver. He’s a treasure – keeps the car clean, doesn’t smoak, earns a ton of money. His only vice is that he rearranges the CDs and we are sometimes surprised by Pakistani music crooning out of the slot we expect Chet Baker to appear from.

Legends, the Spanish restaurant. It’s opposite the taxi rank, and I often wonder what the food and atmosphere are like. Good, I can report. It was crowded with Summernats people talking car bits and being giddy in large groups, but there was a table for two, and we worked our way through a bottle of very nice Spanish rose, mild crusty garlick bread, some tapas and a paella. No dessert – we were stuffed! Not even coffee at Artoven. There were a few minutes left before Paperchain closed and we browsed through. I hung out at the entrance waiting for Kerri at closing time. The staff looked around, turned the lights off and stared at me, as if to say, well why aren’t you leaving?

“My wife’s up the back,” I said, and sure enough, out comes Kerri from behind a bookshelf, looking surprised that the world had suddenly gone dark and made reading difficult.

We got in the car, came home, turned the evaporative cooler on, and collapsed into bed.