Stayed in the same cabin as we did on our way through about 5 weeks ago. Up at 8 a.m…packing up was minimal because we only needed our t-bags and sleeping bags in the cabin with us. Certainly was more convenient than camping in the trailer or a tent...and once in a while convenience is worth the extra money. 😊
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We didn’t leave right away because I wanted to post the blog. Couldn’t get a signal in the cabin last night so I decided to go up on the porch of the office building…figured the signal would be strong up there. Yes, it was strong, but it wasn’t fast. So it took me a bit to do what I wanted to do online. But still we were all showered, shaved, posted and in the truck by 10:15.
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In all likelihood the bikes are not coming out of the trailer until we’re home. Our extended riding season has come to an end…now we’ll have to deal with Michigan’s riding season. Now it’s all about getting home but not wanting to overdo it like we did on the 1st day of our trip. Four hundred miles or so is a bit more doable for the body than 780. Plus there are oddball things to stop and see to break up the monotony of the road. Although that’s probably more for my benefit than Kim’s...that’s something my goal oriented husband has learned about traveling with me…life out on the road is full of stops.
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| Street musician sculpture |
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| Farm animals on the corner |
Not a lot of Roadside America stops on our route out of Oklahoma…or at least stops that interested me. I’m not a big fan of the huge Muffler Man statues…he just looks creepy to me. So I set my sights on Kansas. Oh look, there’s an Early Civil Right Sit-In Lunch Counter in Wichita. Okay so it’s not the actual lunch counter…says here that “The sculpture actually honors a 1958 Wichita civil rights lunch counter sit-in. It got no press coverage at the time and was forgotten for years---until Wichita built the sculpture.” Looks easy to get to and it’s not much of a detour. What do you think? Well, Kim being the giving sort of man that he is, agreed to my plan…but the written directions were slightly messed up and Rapunzel didn’t have a clue what to do when I told her to take us to the Civil Rights Lunch Counter. So I enlarged the map and directed us in that way. Not as easy as I had thought but still we got there. I got my picture taken sitting at the lunch counter and then we walked around a bit looking at the random statues on the sidewalk and street corners. Random statues as in a couple of dogs in mid-stride on the sidewalk…a street performer playing a guitar with a dog listening in appreciation…a cat lounging in the sun with a little bird in front of it…a cow, a pig and some ducks…a little boy pulling a wagon…and a little girl playing with a cat. Those were just some of the sidewalk statues. Also there were two little ‘pocket parks’…little spaces where a building had once stood…filled with more sculptures of children. And in one of these little parks was the Early Civil Rights Sit-in Lunch Counter.😊Wikipedia has this to report on the event:
The Dockum Drug Store sit-in was one of the first organized lunch counter sit-ins for the purpose of integrating segregated establishments in the United States. The protest began in July 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, at the Dockum Drug Store, a store in the old Rexall chain, in which protesters would sit at the counter all day until the store closed, ignoring taunts from counter protesters. The sit-in ended three weeks later when the owner relented and agreed to serve black patrons. There’s more on the background of the sit-in but it’s too lengthy to include here.
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When we parked to go see the lunch counter sculpture we were right beside something called ICT Chalk Talks. I didn’t pay much attention to it until we came back. There were two huge chalkboards on the sidewalk side of a building…and based on the questions posed at the top, my guess was that it was a way to promote the sharing of ideas/information. I knew there had to be more…I looked up ICT Chalk Talks and an article from the Wichita Eagle popped up:
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| Wichita, Kansas |
ICT Chalk Talks will kick off its public engagement initiative with a lunchtime launch party Friday.
The initiative has taken over the Douglas facade of the Caldwell Murdock building, 111-113 E. Douglas, turning it into a community chalkboard. Organizers will post questions, then collect the responses before erasing them and adding new questions.
On Friday, the first question will be posted, and eventgoers can write their own ideas and responses on the chalkboard while enjoying food from local food trucks set up in the Pop-Up Urban Park at 121 E. Douglas from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
ICT Chalk Talks, funded through the Knight Foundation Fund at the Wichita Community Foundation, aims to “engage the public in meaningful conversations in a fun and inspirational way,” according to a news release. The project has also extended to vacant storefronts along Douglas, where local artists Delilah Reed and Maggie Gilmore were commissioned to create artwork for the chalkboards.
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Next I set my sights on the Liberty Bell made of wheat in the little town of Goessel, KS. It wasn’t a huge detour so Kim was on board. It is located in one of the buildings at the Mennonite Heritage Museum. While it was not my intent to spend time looking through an immigration museum…I just wanted to see the bell…the lady at the museum was so enthusiastic to have visitors that I felt obligated to give it a token walk through. This museum is filled with various family displays…each case filled with actual family artifacts that ancestors used after they immigrated either from Russia or Germany. One interesting thing we noticed: there were a lot of old photographs, but there were also pictures of people that looked like hand drawn copies of photographs. They were well done but there was something just a little off that drew attention to the fact they weren’t photographs. We asked the ‘curator’ about that and she said it perplexed her, too. In fact, there is a display for her family with a picture looking photograph of her great grandparents; she said she had the original photographs at home and knows that the one in the museum is not real (it’s a product of two separate photos and an adjustment was made on her grandmother’s height). She’s not at all sure of the process used but finds it interesting that it seemed to be a popular thing during a certain time frame. What I took from my time in the Immigration museum is that what is on display is a lot of family pride…these people are proud of their roots.
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| Liberty Bell made of wheat |
The building with the bell was called the Turkey Red Wheat Palace. It contained not only the full sized wheat replica of the Liberty Bell but also various farm implements from back in the day of actual horses being the horse power. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the joy on a farmer’s face as he hitched up his horse to his new riding plow, tiller, combine, thrasher, corn planter or whatever else he used. It must have been a real luxury to be able to sit on instead of walk behind or even doing some of the work by hand. The Turkey Red Wheat Palace was a walk through time that makes one wonder what old treasures are rusting out there in Grandpa’s barn. 😏 The bell was enclosed in a big display case…lots of reflections from the overhead lights in the building. Not the best for taking pictures but I managed. Getting up close look showed what a work of art it truly is. The sign in front of the display reads:
Liberty Bell
Made of Turkey Red Wheat Straw.
Made by 200 Mennonites in Kansas.
Over 2000 man hours consumed. The
bell measures six feet by six feet. The weavers range in age from 10 to 80.
The Bell’s five and a half foot clapper was made by the spiral weaving of wheat,
with the wheat heads forming the hammer.
The crack and the inscription are made from grains of wheat.
Couldn’t see the clapper and hammer until I stood at a distance. As I looked at the intricacy of the crack and inscription, I could imagine someone hunched over using a pair of tweezers to painstakingly apply all those seeds. Think Corn Palace in South Dakota.
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I’d been looking at KOAs in the general direction we were heading but I didn’t know the specific route we were taking. Kim had the bluetooth speaker in his ear so he was getting directions straight from Rapunzel which left me free to figure out which roadside attraction I wanted to see. So I didn’t try booking a KOA cabin until it appeared everything had closed. Oops! So tonight was a hotel night…1st one of the trip. We stopped in Cameron, MO, because it had a number of hotels…struck out the first 4 places we stopped. Two only had smoking rooms left, 1 had no vacancies at all, and the fourth didn’t have anyone at the desk…there was a number to call if you needed help. Really?? But we found a room at the fifth place we stopped…there were other options but they didn’t have good reviews. I realize everyone has different standards and that’s got to be taken into consideration when reading reviews, but when there’s more negative than positive, it’s a sign…it’s truly a sign that you should look elsewhere.
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This afternoon, in the middle of nowhere Kansas, the area started looking familiar. Drove through an area where fields had been purposefully burned off. In fact some were still burning and for miles the horizon had a smoke haze to it. Anyway, the burnt fields, the hillside with a town name in white stones, and some of the town names on the signs rang a bell. It wasn’t until we passed a sign for the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve that we knew we had been on this road last year. It’s crazy that we just gave Rapunzel our preferred destination and part of the route she picked was a fifty mile stretch we’d been on last year. I mean there’s a lot of roads out there heading in the same direction…
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