Day 5: Gold Diggers

After pulling in late the night before, we slept in a bit and took our time getting ready in the morning. We left the hotel at 9:20 MT, which, compared to our other travel days, was a late start for us. Check out what we saw as we were leaving the hotel.

We headed first to the purple house of some dear friends who had moved from Cincy to the Denver area about 10 years ago. There, we sat down like good little hobbits and had a second breakfast with them. (How could we resist homemade pancakes, fresh fruit, bacon and sausage? My sweet friend sat me at the end of the table next to a tub of Nutella spread and a bowl of chocolate shavings for my pancakes. That, dear readers, is an irresistible situation.)

The weather was only 32 degrees, and though it didn’t feel that cold, our hosts assured us that at higher altitudes, with the wind blowing and the clouds and mist covering the mountains, we would definitely be feeling the cold. Instead of a trip up to Estes National Park, we headed to nearby Flagstaff Mountain….in the “foothills”. (Only Colorado locals would call those mountains “foothills”.)

On the way up to the mountain, Toa and his New Friend rode in our van, while Sweetling and her Purple House Friend rode in the Purple House Peoples’ car. I don’t know what the conversation was in the other car, but in our van New Friend was showing Toa his video game and explaining all the details to Toa. Thus came the quote of the day,

“Only super-monkeys can defeat it.”

You see why Toa and New Friend hit it off right away?

It took quite some time, with the van’s transmission protesting, to drive up the side of the “foothill”. On the way, we had to drive around bikers laboring up, and bikers flying down, all the winding hairpin, cliff side turns of the “foothill”. We didn’t go all the way to the top, just up to a great lookout our Purple House Friends knew about.

It was a gorgeous view.

We got to clamor around this enormous rock cropping on the side of the mountain, which Sweetling and Toa and Mommy all loved. The Jedi loved the view and took several photos and a video for us.

To be honest, we were a bit hesitant about climbing out there at first. (That "we" does not, of course, include the two boys, who would have gladly scrambled out to their doom.) Here is Mr. Purple demonstrating just how safe the outcropping was. This posed shot was one of Toa's favorite things about our trip.

Toa and his New Friend in the background.

Sweetling and her Purple Friend in the foreground.

Needless to say, our hesitation didn't last long.

I saw a chipmunk when I crawled out to take this shot. I tried to lean over the edge to get another glimpse of the little guy, but the Jedi was a voice of caution in that ill-conceived endeavor.

 But that's ok, cause while I had the camera, I snuck in some shots of the Jedi.

The large rocks themselves were run through with quartz….

…and on the trail near the outcropping was a large area of loose rock which the kids loved digging in.

Toa of Boy even found the coveted “gold” he so desperately wanted to discover in Colorado. He found a nice piece of iron pyrate and then he found a rock with a pretty section of “silver” mica crystals.

Sweetling dug up a big piece with a lot of quartz, with help from her dear Purple House Friend.

While we were busy digging, the Jedi went out on the outcropping himself and took some more pictures.

We headed back to the van with our pockets laden down with rocks. (It wasn’t a national park, so a few souvenirs were ok.)

Since digging seemed so popular with all four children, we went from there to Dinosaur Ridge. We just missed the bus ride up the ridge, and so went into their little discovery center to wait for the next bus. The discovery center, though small, was packed full of hands-on activities, and anything hands-on is always a hit with us. Outside of the center was a large sandbox which had been seeded with small fossils. The kids each got to dig up and keep a fossil.

As my sweet friend was giving each of her children their allowance for the week to go spend in the gift shop, Toa, the little monkey, held out his hand too and scored five dollars. Toa was beside himself with joy. I tried to intervene, but was overruled by the giver of the money, who then gave Sweetling five dollars as well to be fair.

By then, we decided that we had “done” dinosaur” ridge, and that a bus ride and guided tour weren’t quite what active, inquisitive children were looking for. So we skipped out and headed to the Colorado Railroad Museum instead.

I, silly me, was skeptical of this choice. I expected several look but don’t touch displays of model trains and maybe one thing for them to climb on. Silly me. This was a huge outdoor museum in a big old train yard with track after track of historic engines and cars, nearly all of which could be climbed in and on.

The kids had a blast. The boys commandeered a small black engine in the middle of the yard and had a grand adventure. I don’t know the details of all the near calamities, but the engine’s bell was constantly peeling and boys were frantically pulling levers and adjusting gauges.

Sweetling and her Purple House Friend explored the whole yard with us, but if I had to guess, I would bet that they had two favorites. One was a red caboose, the entire of which still had all it’s built in furniture for housing the train workers...the bunks, the lockers, the desk, the cupboard with its drop down table door. They both seemed to really enjoy exploring that.

The other thing that really made Sweetling come alive were these two, almost hand carts, that were chained to a short length of track. There was just enough slack in the chain that the carts could be moved back and forth a little bit. Mr. Purple moved the cart the girls were in, to squeals of delighted protesting, then he came around to move the cart the boys were in. Toa was sitting backward yanking on hand levers when the cart suddenly jolted forward underneath him and came to a quick stop. Toa looked up, totally surprised.

“What did you do, Toa?” asked the Jedi, who was wise to the trick being played.

“I don’t know!!!” exclaimed Toa, who then immediately began pulling on the same lever again. Toa of course, wised up himself, and the boys teamed up to move their car themselves.

The girls took turns moving while the other was in it (and stealthily putting on the hand brake while the other was trying to move the cart.) Sweetling would have spend all her time on the carts and in the caboose if she could.

Personally, I loved the reconstructed roundhouse with its working turntable. (Ok, I loved all of it, but I’d never seen an actual roundhouse before. I’m amazed at the engineers who worked out the roundhouse and its turntable as an efficient way to move and manage multiple honking heavy locomotive steam engines. Really, who thinks, oh, lets just make a perfectly balanced teeter totter on a swivel base that can be pushed by hand and turned to line up with whatever track is needed?)

Amazingly enough, despite all the digging and climbing that we had done, we were still presentable enough to go to dinner at Beau Jo’s pizza. Even Sweetling, who was wearing white sweatpants, didn’t look dirty. Why? Because the dry Colorado dirt brushed right off like it hadn’t even been there. (Yeah, only a Mom cares about stuff like that.)

We had Mountain Pie pizza’s at Beau Jo’s, and they really hit the spot after our busy day. Sadly, at the end of dinner, we had to bid farewell to the Purple House People and head back to the hotel for baths and to pack and be ready to depart early the next morning. (And for Toa to make some progress on the lego-like locomotive set that was purchased at the museum with his cunningly gained bonus cash.)

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Day 4: Auntie Em!

We headed out of Kansas City at 8:16 in the morning and the original plan was to drive till we got to Salina, Kansas. But, I had picked up a flyer for a store called the Kansas Sampler, and on our way out of town saw a billboard for it. And, I really wanted an Oz souvenir. So, we pulled over and did some internet searches for the store. We found a location in Lawrence, Kansas and detoured to there.

As we were driving into Lawrence, we passed a few stores for beads, gems, and such that all had a certain feel to their name and signs. The Jedi said, “why are there hippie stores in the middle of Kansas?”

Then we hit the main downtown strip.

“Oh look,” said the Jedi, “it’s a little hippie mecca.”

“It’s all the sunflowers,” I reasoned. “Living around so many sunflowers just fills you up with peace and love and joy. I wouldn’t mind living in a hippie mecca.”

The Jedi’s response was, “I’ve got news for you; we are never living in a hippie mecca.”

The store was full of cute sunflowers themed objects, Oz themed objects, and other Kansas stuff. I got my refrigerator magnet and a little silver bell for a friend. Sweetling got a plush tin man and an Oz postcard for her collection. Toa got a plush flying monkey, and the Jedi bought a t-shirt for Toa which reads, “Mommy’s Lil Flying Monkey”.

We left Lawrence considerably behind our original drive schedule. Also in the morning a wind picked up and we traveled under a high wind advisory. The sunny day turned to a hazy one with all the dust blowing. The horizon was a brown fog and the semi’s on the road were waggling and swaying slightly in the wind.

We hit Salina for lunch a little after noon, instead of an hour before noon. We had lunch at Spangles, which had great food in a fun 50’s dinner décor. It had a working jukebox, but it played CDs instead of the little vinyl records. (I know, no one even makes the vinyl records anymore.) I led Sweetling into the restaurant with her eyes closed, since we had to walk directly into the wind from the van. As we ate, I overheard two men near our table discussing the merits of "putting in 15 or 20 acres of cherry trees." We had dessert at Spangle too, which I was particularly pleased with, since their vanilla soft serve was lactose free. Toa and I split a Reece’s mudslide.

We left the restaurant, still behind, but we still went to the Smokey Hill Museum. I had wanted to go there for their recreated pioneer home. Inside the museum was a replica of the first cabin built in Salina in 1858. It was based off of a photograph and a salvaged corner of the original.

The museum also held a room that was a history of women’s fashion in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I did not photograph every dress in the room. I think that shows great restraint.

 Toa and Sweetling liked the big bucket of real buffalo parts.

It was 3:21 before we left Salina, and that left a LOT of Kansas still to drive through. We skipped our second planned stop for the day with the intention of driving straight through to dinner. We popped The Wizard of Oz in for the kids, because you have to watch The Wizard of Oz in Kansas, and away we went.

The wind kept up its intensity for a while but died down after an hour or so. The day turned warm, in the low 80s, and lovely. I was surprised at how very few paved roads there were. Nearly every road I saw was a reddish tinged dirt. Somewhere in the middle of Kansas we saw a fighter jet sitting by the side of the highway. It was right next to an exit, so we got off and went over to take a couple of pictures. The Jedi said he thinks it is an F-14. It was part of a little park. The rest of the park had a few picnic tables and a couple little grills set in concrete. And an F-14.

We stopped for dinner in Colby. Originally, we were going to hit a steakhouse. But, after sitting in the car all day and with a long drive still ahead of us, even the Jedi didn’t want a big steak dinner. Instead, we would up at a little China Buffet. I was dubious, but the Jedi went in and checked it out first and said it looked good. So we went in, and it was incredible. There were a few residents of Colby eating there who were friendly and pleasant. The place was clean, neat, and appealing. The waiter was absolutely wonderful. His English was limited, but his heart and his attitude was beyond fault. Toa of Boy loves lo mein, but the lo mein at the buffet table was full of cabbage, which Toa hates. So the kitchen made him a special plate of beef lo mein without cabbage. The quality of food overall was very good and very tasty. I was so impressed for a tiny little place in a tiny little town in Kansas.

From Colby, we drove to Goodland, because I just had to see the “world’s largest easel” painted with a copy of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. We got there just at sunset, and the wind had turned cold. The Jedi had to snap pictures for me, cause I was shivering so hard I couldn’t hold the camera still.

Having taken a few photos, we drove off into the Kansas sunset.

We crossed the border into Colorado at 8:20, but I have no idea if that was 8:20 mountain time or central time. The important thing to know about crossing the state border was that Susan got to say, “Toto, I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore!”

After driving for an hour or more, we needed to pull over for a restroom stop. Ha. I never knew eastern Colorado was so sparse. The Jedi said it felt like we were driving in a tunnel. It was pitch black. Occasionally there were a few lights in the distance off to one side or the other, but there were hardly any other cars on the road in either direction, no streetlights, no horizon glow. Nothing. We entertained ourselves watching for the occasional tumbleweed that would be blown across the highway, illuminated briefly by our headlights, and disappear into the blackness.

Finally, we saw an exit that had a gas symbol on its sign, so we pulled off. We saw a few light up to the north, but a sign said “business center”, and pointed to a road to the west. I thought maybe the road to the rest curved around to those lights in the north, so we took the road. It quickly became a gravel road to nowhere, so we turned around and got back on the highway.

We had better luck at the next exit, where there were two gas stations and a Wendy’s. The Wendy’s was closed, but the manager came out and opened the door for us so that we could go in and go to the restroom. The wind was back with a vengeance and it was bitterly cold. While the kids and I were in the bathroom, the Jedi rearranged the van so that they could sleep the rest of the drive. The Wendy’s manager said they were expecting snow, and to be careful, because there was a wind advisory out.

So, we drove the rest of the way to Denver in the dark, in the snow, in a strong wind. We got to our hotel a little after 11:30 mountain time. Very tired.

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Day 3: No Intervention Needed

Thursday was the Jedi’s birthday. It was absolutely fitting that we were in the barbeque capital of the world. However, we were also in Independence Missouri, which is now practically a suburb of Kansas City. Independence Missouri was also the jumping off point for the Oregon Trail. So, despite the fact that it was the Jedi’s birthday and despite the fact that the Jedi had been pseudo teasing that we would be getting barbeque for breakfast, we had breakfast at the hotel and headed out to the Frontier Trails Museum.
Right next door to the museum we found an unexpected treasure, the Chicago and Alton Depot.

We walked over for a picture….

….and this kind elderly gentleman came out and invited us in. He was more of a treasure than many of the artifacts in the depot. The depot itself was the original depot built in 1879. After it closed, it fell into disrepair and was scheduled to be demolished. A group came together to raise the funds needed to move it to a new location and refurbish it, keeping it as historically accurate as possible. It was full of things that had actually been in use in the depot, some of them original from 1879. Our guide said that when they started the refurbishing process, a gentleman stepped forward. He said back when the depot had been decommissioned, he had taken many items from the depot. Now, he said, he thought it was time to return them. Without his unauthorized preservation, many of the artifacts would have been lost forever.
Among the items returned were—

an original phone, which had been installed just 6 years after Bell had filed his patent;

an Edison glass jar battery, invented when he still worked for the railroad (I think);

and an Edison phonograph, a second edition model with a new volume control feature. (Our guide told us that the originals didn’t have a volume control…so that if you wanted it to play softer, you had to stuff a sock in it, which is where that phrase came from. ) Our guide played some Irish music on the phonograph for us.

But, cooler even than these things was our host himself. He demonstrated the telegraph devices for us, quickly clicking out each child’s name in Morse code as well as the different signals the stations used to quickly transmit information about trains and departures and whatnot. He showed us how they used to get messages to the engineers and conductors on the train…by tying the messages to large metal hoops attached to a long pole. Someone on the train would lean out and snatch the message from the hoop as the train steamed past. He said he broke his own wrist doing this, and it got him a day vacation from work.

He took us on a tour of the agent’s apartment upstairs, which was all furnished in period pieces. He talked us through what life would have been like for the family and which chores each child would do. A butter churn was in the kitchen. He said the wives of the agents would frequently fill their butter church by dipping a ladle into the milk jugs the farmers had stored downstairs to be shipped out on the next train. They would just take a little of the cream from off the top of each milk jug, in the hopes that their dipping wouldn’t be noticed. He said that’s where the phrase “skimming a little off the top” originated.

He was an absolute joy, and I loved listening to him. Back downstairs, the kids each bought a wooden train whistle, and he taught them each a few train signals for their whistles. Toa of Boy has been tooting away on his whistle ever since.

We then headed next door to our original destination of the Frontier Trails Museum.

I don’t really know what the kids thought of this museum; I was too lost in my own little world of covered wagon bliss.

One thing I did note, one of the sections was about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the trappers and hunters that blazed the trail west. They had small squares of real animal fur as part of the display. Across the aisle, they had a glass case of full skin furs. Toa was grossed out by the full furs. Sweetling was intrigued. It was a complete reversal of what I would have expected. In the gift shop, Sweetling bought a coonskin cap. She was disappointed to later learn that it wasn’t made of real fur.

By then, it was lunch time, but my patient husband indulged me a little more by driving to a nearby field that still held the faintest traces of swales made by the wagon trains well over a century ago. I didn’t take any photos, because the faint corduroying of the field would never come through on a photo. Neither did I go all teary eyed over the experience of being at ground zero of the great overland migration, though I did come close.

Finally, we left my favorite period of history behind, and headed on to lunch at Oklahoma Joe’s. Anthony Bourdon listed Oklahoma Joe’s on his “Top 13 Places to Eat Before You Die.” Anthony said,

“Oklahoma Joe’s is the best barbeque in Kansas City, and that makes it the best barbeque in the world.”

Anthony Bourdon was dead on the money. Oklahoma Joe’s was awesome. As a measure of its awesomeness, my nearly vegetarian daughter who doesn’t really care for barbeque not only INHALED a full quarter chicken, but she was the first one finished with her food and WANTED MORE. Maybe it was the coonskin cap channeling some of its primal energy into her, but I think it was the awesome barbeque.
As Sweetling and I were in the bathroom washing our hands, the Jedi started chatting with the manager. By the time Sweetling and I came out, the manager was offering our family our own private tour of the kitchens and smokers of the restaurant. That was really cool. Our second unexpected special treat for the day.

I posted on Facebook that I might have to talk the Jedi into looking for a new job in Kansas City, just so I could eat at Oklahoma Joe’s on a regular basis. Luckily, the Jedi bought a large container of rub at their store, so we can recreate some of the Oklahoma Joe taste back in Cincy. I could then leave without having to grieve never getting that meat again. (The Jedi, of course, would have comment about meeting my meat needs, but I can’t repeat it here.)

In the afternoon, the Jedi had arranged a meeting with some friends in ministry to talk about adoption and orphan care. He dropped the kids and I off at Union Station in Kansas City because there was a little museum there called “Science City”. He thought it might be a nice little diversion from the kids while he was meeting with the ministry leaders.

Science City turned out to be our third unexpected special treat for the day.

I had expected something small and straightforward, but that place was large, interactive, engaging, and incredible.

We had a blast.

I think its something out old train stations that just channel all their energy into making amazing museums. This was the ceiling when we first walked into Union Station. Surrounded with all that artistic, historical, magnificant energy, how could the museum creators make anything less?

After the Jedi picked us up, our barbeque tour of force continued. We had several restaurants that we wanted to try, so we picked up some carry-out orders from two of the restaurants and took them back to the hotel to have a barbeque feast. In retrospect, while the other barbeque was all ok, we should have just gone back to Oklahoma Joe’s. Nothing else was even in the same league.

And, since we hadn’t gorged ourselves enough, we headed out for “frozen custard” as a night snack.

All in all, an absolute win of a day.

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