A Full-time Life

A PIONEER HERITAGE (Remember Whensday)

Here's a backyard picnic with several generations of Bill's family.  The picture was taken in the late '40s. It is in Clarkston Washington, where both Bill and I grew up.  Third from the right on the right hand side of the table is his great-grandmother who, as a small girl, was on one of the last wagon trains to cross the country on the Oregon Trail.  She said she walked it twice.  (To get rid of her excess energy, her parents would send her to run ahead of the wagon for awhile and then back.)  Great-grandmother Elliot did not pass away until Bill was in his early teens, so he remembers a few good pioneer stories. 

This picture of Bill was taken at around the same time as as the family snapshot above.  Back then, he would far rather play with the dog than have his picture taken with his parents and grandparents.  Weren't we all like that back then?  And now wouldn't it be nice to be able to go back and revisit those days, so we could hear more stories?

(Click on the snapshots to see them better.  This is my first attempt to scan old pictures and it really works well!)

When we were older than most of those old relatives in the first picture, we were lucky to get to visit the museum at the start of the Oregon Trail in St. Joseph Missouri.  And here is Grandmother Elliot's great-grandson standing at the point where she started her journey way back when.  We would ask her more about the journey if we could.

Click on the link below to see other peoples' "Remember Whensdays":

Remember Whensday

 

CROSS COUNTRY ROAD TRIP 2008, part 2: Oklahoma and Missouri

 

We left Tucamcari New Mexico on October 26 and, as Bill said, just "waltzed across Texas" (earworms anybody?) without even spending a night.  Although I can look at a map and see that the part of Texas between Tucamcari and Oklahoma isn't all that far, it was still shocking to me that we could get in and out of the great State of Texas during a day's travel.  I swear we've spent weeks and weeks in Texas on other road trips, but those were different parts of the state with more stuff to see. 

So our first overnight stop on the second part of this road trip was in Elk City, Oklahoma.  This was the first time we had RV'd overnight in this state, although, in contrast to Texas, we'd spent a hour or less crossing it on several other trips.  Those other times were across the panhandle, which is uninteresting, at least the little we see driving across it.  So we were pleasantly surprised at how lush and green everything was as we entered this part of the state.  

The previous day, back in not-so-beautiful Tucamcari, we had grazed a post pulling into our spot, (which wasn't nearly as big as advertised) and put a slight ding in the trim.  So after we settled in at Elk City, Bill went out to repair the damages and a whole bunch of guys came out to kibitz.  There is no quicker way to meet people on an overnight stop.  It was fun though, because that whole entire day on the road we actually didn't see one single human being outside of a car.  Sometimes on the road it seems like we are all pod people and there is no life outside of the vehicles.  So the RV Park here was a welcome and friendly overnight stop.  It is called Elk Creek RV Park.  There's no web site, but the review sites give it a positive rating and so do we.

The next night, still in Oklahoma, was in Checotah at Lake Eufaula West KOA.  Again, it was a beautiful drive and this was an interesting stop with woodsy walking paths and nature trails to the Lake and a small restaurant on site.   

The only problem is of course, now that we've seen the good part of it, we want to spend more time in this lovely state. 

We arrived at Branson View RV Park, Missouri the next night. Here we had one of the loveliest view spots ever.  It took a little juggling to get into it, but it was well worth it.   Every so often we are lucky enough to get a beautiful water view, but this was the first time ever we'd had a hilltop view looking down at a City.   We liked this park and if we'd stayed longer, our leg muscles would definitely have grown stronger.  Walking up and down the steep hills, was ...well, breathtaking. 

In some quarters, RVers have a reputation of being a little bit tight with their money.  Merchants think we bring everything with us and don't go anywhere. We feel that reputation is generally unfounded and certainly doesn't apply to us.   We eat (in and out), go to theaters, movies, shop ... whatever we'd do if we weren't RVers.   But our week in Branson threw us right into the tightwad stereotype.  We  couldn't find a single thing in this entertainment city that interested us enough to shell out the big bucks for tickets.  Even the restaurants seemed uninteresting and the whole town too glitzy and fake for our taste.  But we liked our RV Park with its beautiful view and enjoyed enjoyed driving around to see more of the scenic Ozarks.   

One of those drives was to Point Lookout where we had Sunday brunch at The Keeter Center, the restaurant of Hard Work U (otherwise known as the College of the Ozarks).    This is a fully-accredited and well-rated liberal arts and sciences University founded on the premise that each student works on campus to pay for his or her education.  These aren't make-work but real jobs that the students do in restaurants, the farm, and about 80 other jobs or industries right on the campus.  These kids graduate free of debt and with an appreciation for work.  We were impressed.  Some of the job stations are in the dining room and kitchen of the restaurant.  The brunch table included produce and meat raised on their own farms.  After our lovely meal, we toured a little bit of the campus and learned some of history of the school and the Ozark region.  

Chasing Autumn is one of our favorite things to do and we loved the Ozarks.  We drove through more of them on our way to Hot Springs, our next stop (and the next post).  But if we get to visit this area again, we'll spend more time in Oklahoma and Arkansas and less in Branson.

MUSEUMS IN MISSOURI

We were in Missouri in the Fall of 2004.   As with other places in the Midwest, there was more to explore than expected.   And once again, we stayed a longer than originally planned.  Most surprising was how much we enjoyed all of the museums.   Over the years we've visited too many community museums that are really really bad.  We've seen enough collections of donated  -- and dusty -- memorabilia to last the rest of our lives.  So one of us always pretends to be sorry that we don't have time to turn off at every museum sign we see in every community we pass  through. 

But all of the ones we visited in Missouri were fun to visit and provided painless learning experiences.

In St. Joseph, we visited the Oregon Trail Museum at the Trail's starting point..  A personal connection to the Trail made this tour especially interesting. 

As a small girl, Bill's great-grandmother was on one of the last wagon trains to come from Missouri to the "Far Northwest" (as it says on the sign).  We've walked on wagon ruts on the Oregon part of the trail (near Baker City) and it was thought-provoking to be where these ancestors'  long journey started.  (We do not know of any family members who stayed in Missouri.  There probably are some.)  This great-grandmother lived until Bill was eleven or twelve and he remembers her stories well.  She told him she walked the trail twice because she would run a ways ahead to get rid of her excess energy and then run back and hop on the wagon.   We used to wish we could do something like that with kids on long car-camping trips. 

The Pony Express Museum is also in St Joe and also well worth a visit.

Our next stop was Kansas City, where we toured the remarkable Arabia Steamship Museum.  River transportation was vital to commerce back in frontier days.  In 1856, the Arabia steamboat, which was delivering supplies to frontier settlers, hit a snag and sank in the Missouri River.  At the time, there was no way to rescue the ship (the crew all escaped).   Eventually, the River changed course and the wreckage was buried in the dirt.  Over 130 years later, a couple of brothers from Missouri got interested in the story and began studying the wreck and mapping the probable river path from back then.  They found the boat buried in the middle of a Kansas cornfield.  They got the remains and the barrels and crates of supplies dug up.  They have become experts in fresh-water restoration.  It is amazing to see the collections of materials that were lost with the ship and then recovered.  

Here is the museum website:  http://www.1856.com. 

You really get two stories for the price of one here.  Not only he story of the boat and the look at all the necessities that were lost to the frontier settlers when she sank but also the remarkable story of the people determined to find the boat and how they learned to save and share the contents.  That family owns and runs the museum and we got to meet one of the brothers during our tour.

In Independence, now a part of the greater Kansas City Area, we visited the home of Harry and Bess Truman.  They lived there before he became president (it was actually Bess's childhood home), and, after his terms of office, lived out their remaining lives there.    It was a simple, unpretentious home, even for that time, when most ordinary peoples' homes were way simpler than they are today.  The Trumans never really updated it at all.  Worn-out old linoleum on the floor, old toaster on the old wooden kitchen table...being an ex-president back then was not a lucrative proposition.  The guide at the Truman home told us that Harry and Bess never wanted any of the artifacts from his presidency at their home -- they wanted their home to stay the same as it was before they went to Washington.

The mementos are displayed at the Truman Visitor Center/Library.  The displays, films, and exhibits provided an excellent overview of this presidency and the history of that important era.  We could easily have spent days there.

President Truman was famous for walking all over.  All of the street signs in Independence have a silhouette of him strolling the streets of town.

For a different kind of learning (!) experience in Kansas City, we visited two famous barbeque joints -- Arthur Bryant's and KC's.  Both of these are chains now, but we went to the original hole-in-the-wall restaurants.  The food was good and these visits gave us a chance to learn some more history of the area and see a couple of different neighborhoods in the inner city.  

From Kansas City, we went to Hannibal where we stayed at the Mark Twain Caves RV Park. The park is located near the cave that Mark Twain is said to have visited and written into his story (the Becky Thatcher cave).  From Old Town Hannibal, we took the Mark Twain River Boat Excursion for beautiful views and an overview of river history from the guide.  The next day we toured Sam Clemons' boyhood home and a museum in the old Hannibal drugstore 

  Missouri was a fun state to visit and we learned that some museums are definitely worth visiting.

  

TRAVEL -- REAL AND FICTIONAL

JA Jance writes an enjoyable mystery series that's set in Cochise County.  Her main character, Joanna Brady, is the County sheriff.   Jance's descriptions of the country-side (and the passages about the length of time the officers spend in their cars) are spot-on.  The author lives in Tucson and in Seattle (where she has set another mystery series).  But she grew up in Cochise County and obviously knows and loves the area.  One day when we were driving around looking for the post office we happened on the sheriff's office complex at the outskirts of Bisbee.  You almost expected to see Sheriff Brady and her deputies.  We wondered what the real-life officers think about their fictional counterparts.  So this got me to thinking about other places we've been where favorite books are set. 

This is the "Little House on the Prairie" in DeSmet, South Dakota.  In September, 2004, we actually drove quite a few  miles out of our way to stay in this little town, where there is the church that the Ingalls family attended and a little museum dedicated to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her books.  It was a pleasant little town and a nice drive out to "Laura's Living Prairie" the homestead claim where the family lived.   (This was the second place the family homesteaded -- maybe the last five or six books).  Bill didn't mind the trip and enjoyed looking at the old home and farm tools -- but it would have been a good place to be with somebody else who remembered reading about and loving the family; the Little House series really is kind of a a girl-thing.

Later on that same Fall -- across a few states and after several other interesting stops-- we stayed at the Mark Twain Caves RV Park in Hannibal, Missouri.  The park is located near the cave that Mark Twain is said to have visited and written into his story (the Becky Thatcher cave).  From Old Town Hannibal, we took the Mark Twain River Boat Excursion for beautiful views and an overview of river history from the guide.  The next day we toured Sam Clemons' boyhood home and a museum in the old Hannibal drugstore.   In the visitor center, we bought new copies of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer to re-read and then to give away, because it had been such a long time since we'd read those wonderful books. 

Bill really likes the Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke -- those are set in the Bayou country of Louisiana, an area which we both love. 

Pre-retirement, we spent quite a bit of camping time in Steinbeck country in California -- and he's one of our favorite authors still.   

It's fun to see places that you've only read about and interesting to realize that the fiction we enjoy most is regional -- we get travel books and good stories all in one that way.

And then, of course, there was our trip to England.  Here's where there are people who plan all their travels and recreational time around their favorite authors.  We just stumbled across these places by accident.  We saw where Jane Austen lived in Bath.  And a whole lot of places where Charles Dickens hung out and wrote.  The Trafalgar Tavern here is one of them.  And then there was that other guy, William, whats-his-name ... oh, Shakespeare!   

So, that's the end of the post because I've worked up from books we read now to books we read in the past, to books we re-read, to books we should read someday, if only we live long enough!