I am adding San Diego to my short list of favorite cities. I have now explored nearly every major city in the US and only have a few left to visit.
San Diego is a nice drive, go through CO though at least one direction of travel rather than the desert. Put over 4000 miles on the car!
Anyway, after visiting SD, LA, Vegas and Phoenix (all for the first time), I once again have thoughts about KC. KC is in bad shape and KC is not so bad. Make sense?
Vegas is cool to visit for a day or two but could never imagine living in that place. Why is it growing so fast?
Phoenix has built up a nice, clean downtown and the stadium is sweet, but it's a giant suburb and a hot suburb at that. And why are they building that new arena in the middle of nowhere? Phoenix is nothing special at all, but we will return to Surprise (stadium complex is pretty cool, better than baseball city). I'm sure it's a nice city to visit in the spring, but again, why is this place growing so fast? (being sarcastic here) Great Mexican food though.
Did not spend a lot of time in LA, but it's what I expected, traffic, freeways, sprawl, no sense of place etc. We stayed in Orange County with relatives. Imagine JoCo on steroids, enough said.
San Diego is freaking awesome. It reminds me of Denver on the ocean instead of near the Rockies. That new downtown baseball stadium is really going to push the Downtown area to the next level, even though SD already has a very vibrant Downtown and a huge Downtown population, like Denver, SD manages to have a vibrant Downtown, great urban districts and nice suburbs and beach areas too, nice transit system, clean, well maintained infrastructure and no vacant buildings.
I will go more into the trip if anybody is interested, but will stop for now other than a few thoughts about KC.
KC is in an awesome setting, no mountains or beaches, but much better than Vegas or Phoenix or many other cities like Dallas or Indy. I was so happing to see trees again.
KC has a long way to go to clean up it's Downtown and it's general appearance. Nearly every city I visit puts KC to shame when it comes to general aesthetics or first impression. I can only imagine someone driving through KC on it's horribly outdated highway system and getting off Downtown to see so much decay and extremely old infrastructure like traffic signals and sidewalks, not to mention all the vacant building and under used parking lots.
I know there is a lot going on in KC, and there are only a few cities that I truly would leave KC for, but KC has got to get going, even with all that is going on in KC, places like SD, Denver and even Phoenix are truly leaving us in thier dust.
We have got to get more bi-state cooperation and build up KCMO at whatever the cost. Build transit, build new stadiums, rebuild the roads and bridges.
The thing that bugs me the most is that KC still could really be a top city in the U.S. This city by far has more potential than any city I have visited, but it's just not capitializing on it. KC is too conservative, too much of a tightass and too busy competing within it's own metro area to get the things done that every other city out there seems to be doing.
But hey, it's cheap to live here and you can easily travel the country
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)