Lawrence, Kansas

Here's a riddle for you:

Question: What is silver, acts like a boomerang, and has the power to change travel plans?

Give up?

Answer: Our car!!!

That's right. Read on.

Well, as they say (and as we constantly reminded ourselves), people on the Oregon Trail had their share of troubles, so who are we to complain. Aw, the heck with it. we're gonna complain anyway. You would too.

Well, this was an interesting day (let's hear it for euphemisms). After getting up and posting that oh-so-interesting Truman info, we revisited the Frontier Trails Museum, which sits RIGHT on the Oregon Trail. The woman that worked there gave us a free return pass, as we got there pretty late yesterday. Great little museum. One of the most poignant exhibits there was about all of the debris--apparently the whole Oregon Trail was littered with possessions, valuable and otherwise--that pioneers had to abandon to lighten their loads. In this exhibit, there was a diary entry of an 11 year old girl next to the rolling pin that really captured the experience, I thought:

"It was getting so late that at the meeting of the men of the wagon train it was decided to throw away every bit of surplus weight so that better speed could be made...a man named Smith had a wooden rolling pin that it was decided was useless and must be abandoned. I shall never forget how that big man stood there with tears streaming down his face as he said 'Do I have to throw this away? It was my mother's. I remember she always used it to roll out her biscuits, and they were awful good biscuits" --Lucy Ann Henderson, 1846


And then we took off for our great trail adventure. First stop, Kansas City and the Missouri River (do you know that the entire Oregon Trail follows along rivers?)

In Kansas City, we decided to visit a really unusual museum. It was fascinating. It turns out that there was this steamboat (the Arabia), used mostly for freight, that sank suddenly and completely in the Missouri River in the mid 1800's. It was filled with 220 tons of goods to be sold in stores in the area. Over time, the path of the Missouri river shifted, and mud and then dirt gradually buried the ship so that it was then located some distance from the river, under a plot of farm land. In the 1980's, a group of men--with no former related experience--decided to excavate it, and they dug up the whole thing, and all its cargo. The cargo had been buried in water and mud for over 100 years, and it was all in absolutely perfect condition (right down to the pickes and pie fillings) packed in its crates. All of the goods and parts of the ship are now displayed in this museum. It was really interesting--we even met one of the guys who dug it all up. Incredible. Here are a couple of photos. The one with the face is the end of a huge iron piece of the engine--inspiring how people used to see fit to make such mechanical parts so beautiful as well. The other one is of the wall of fine china and glassware (not my photo, I got it from the web, as I didn't take a photo of that spot and thought it was very impressive). There are rooms and rooms of stuff. I put a couple of links about this ship in the links section, so you can see how they dug it up, where it was found in a cornfield, etc--it's really interesting.




Then we took off for Lawrence, Kansas. We almost got there when the "Check Engine" light came on in our car (a silver Subaru Forester), and we found out that the only way to remedy it was to return to Kansas city (about 40 miles away) and exhange it, which we did. (sigh) We then returned to Lawrence, Kansas, but due to two national softball tournaments and college orientation at the University of Kansas, there seemed to be no hotel rooms left in the whole city (though there was a Sheridan's Frozen Custard stand next to the Best Western again!). We eventually found one in a different part of town, but no internet, so no blog.

Lawrence is a nice place--college town, somewhat artsy, etc. One highlight--we passed an 6 unit apartment building called "Harvard Square Apartments". I meant to go back and take a photo, but forgot about it--aaaugh! Learned my lesson, and now I'm stopping to take photos when I think of it.

Tomorrow, we're off toward Nebraska....lots of sights on the way. See you then!