We're Not In Kansas Anymore

STATES VISITED: Missouri /Kansas / Colorado

Today was our biggest mileage push, barreling across the whole of Kansas and a goodly portion of Colorado – over 600 miles in one day. We figured there were fewer attractions to see in Kansas, so we might as well just drive like a batmobile out of hell.

Naturally, once we got going, we discovered that I-70 through Kansas offers non-stop tourist action. The Legendary Dorothy House, in Liberal KS! The Steinberg Natural History Museum in Hays KS! The hometown of Wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley in (you guessed it) Oakley KS! The world’s largest prairie dog town in Grainfield KS! The Prairie Museum in Colby KS! And, only a hundred miles or so off the road, Castle Rock, the Pioneer Museum (in Nebraska, actually, but so long as you’re in the area), and the world-famous Rock City in Minneapolis, KS, which used to be advertised in huge yellow letters on the roofs of barns all over the Midwest (those that weren’t already advertising Mammoth Cave or Mail Pouch Tobacco). Alas, we had no time for any of it.

On the other hand, the landscape was worth the whole trip. First, between Manhattan and Salina, we rolled through the Flint Hills, a luminous rolling panorama of rounded hilltops and wooded hollows and outcrops of gray stone, in spots almost reminiscent of Ireland. The soil here is too thin and rocky for much agriculture, so a fair bit remains of the original tallgrass prairie that used to blanket this part of the world. The grass grows taller here because eastern Kansas isn’t as dry as western Kansas, and it’s a rich mix of blue stem and other grasses sprinkled with wildflowers. It was still too early in the season for the really tall growth – five or six feet high – but beautiful nonetheless.

We stopped for lunch at a Dairy Queen in Abilene, home of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not surprisingly, after yesterday’s Truman marathon, the kids refused to visit the Eisenhower site. Oh, well, another opportunity squandered.

By the way, notice that yellow emblem on the road signs. It’s supposed to be a sunflower – Kansas is known as the Sunflower State. After the beehive on Utah road signs, this is now my next favorite state highway emblem.

The terrain became much flatter west of Salina. The only trees we could see were planted in a dense cluster around the farmhouses – otherwise it’s just a horizon-wide sweep of high plains. Crops stretched out on either hand – first soybeans on the right and wheat on the left, then changing to wheat on the left and soybeans on the right, the soybeans sparkling in intense green, the wheat a plush carpet of dry gold.

There wasn’t as much corn as I had expected, though -- so much for “I’m as corny as Kansas in August.” Maybe it’s just too dry for corn. Wherever we saw corn, I also noticed these spidery steel irrigation contraptions.

Houses are few and far between out here. Every once in a while, you'll see something mirage-like shimmering on the horizon that looks like a cluster of condo towers, but it turns out to be a huge complex of silos and grain elevators. It made me think of the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her friends see the Emerald City towering in the distance -- I wonder if L. Frank Baum had this in mind?

Another thing I noticed, agriculture-wise -- instead of those spotted herds of dairy cows like we have back east, the cows here were mostly these brawny black cattle. Black Angus? Some kind of beef cattle, for sure. I suppose this is the part of their lives where they get to frolic free before they get shipped off to some hellhole of a feedlot. (See, I've been reading my Michael Pollan.)

Given the wide open spaces, I guess it’s not surprising that we’d roll through a few miles of land that have been converted to a new high-tech wind farm.

If you look close, down to the right you’ll see an old-fashioned prairie windmill, like something out of Shane or High Plains Drifter, dwarfed by those gleaming steel blades of the new giants. (Props to Hugh for getting this all in one shot.)

Past the wind farm, we also saw a few farms with a number of little oil wells pumping away amidst the soybeans. The heads of these pumps remind me of the cartoon crows Heckle and Jekyll, dipping their beaks rhythmically up and down.

At long last we crossed the line into a new time zone – the evocatively named Mountain Time – and soon after crossed the border into Colorado. We thought we'd see mountains right away -- HA! No, just more high plains, though it did get a little more hilly, with tufts of silvery sagebrush cropping up in the grassy margins along the road.

And hey -- guess what the speed limit is here? TAKE THAT YOU CONNECTICUT WIMPS!! Needless to say, everybody still drives at 10 miles over the speed limit.

Then the real drama of the drive began -- we drove right into a violent thunderstorm. We could spot it several miles ahead across the plains -- really dramatic. It lasted for about 20 intense minutes, then we could see the blue skies ahead, and we got our first glimpse of the Rockies in the distance. (You can't see it in these pictures, though.) Here's the sequence:

Traffic in Denver was abysmal -- there had been a six-car pile-up on I-70 east of downtown, and we got caught in the standstill traffic. By the time we pulled into the Grand Hyatt, we were thoroughly exhausted from our long day's journey into night. Which meant just one thing -- room service dinner!! YAY!!!!!

Independence Day

STATES VISITED: Missouri / Kansas

Not making much progress, eh? Well, the way the baseball schedules worked out, we had to stay in one place over the holiday weekend, and we had piles of laundry to do, too. All of which made a perfect excuse to take an extra day in Missouri and drag the family up to Independence to visit the home of one of my favorite Presidents, Harry S Truman.

As I think I mentioned earlier, I've been reading a book called Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure, by Martin Algeo, which chronicles a cross-country car trip Harry and Bess made in 1953 from Independence back east to Washington, D.C., and then back home again. It's a very entertaining account of early auto tourism, and as it happens, Harry and Bess stopped in many of the towns we've visited on this trip -- Hannibal, Indianapolis, Columbus, Wheeling. It just seemed too perfect a coincidence.

The more I read about Harry Truman, the more I like him. This high-gabled white Victorian house was where he and Bess lived from the day they got married (when they lived with her mother and brothers) to the day he died, with a few stints in Washington thrown in here and there. While he was President, it was referred to as the "summer White House," but there's hardly anything Presidential about it. Inside, it's furnished in a random mix of antique love seats and needlepointed slipper chairs along with mid-century chintz-covered armchairs and end tables. The kitchen is circa 1950, with a red-Formica-topped kitchen table where Harry and Bess ate breakfast and lunch. Harry's book-lined study is more of a Father Knows Best-ish den than a baronial reading room. Those books weren't just for display, though -- Truman, who had no more than a high-school degree, was a largely self-educated man and voracious reader. The house is a great testament to Truman's desire not to get swell-headed just because he'd accidentally landed in the job of President.

Though it's only a few minutes from Kansas City, Independence still feels like a sleepy small town where everybody knows everybody else. Except for a series of brass plaques identifying certain landmarks -- the church where Harry and Bess got married, the barber shop where he had his hair cut, the store above which his regular poker club met, the courthouse (right) where he served as judge for a dozen years or so -- the town isn't cashing in on the Truman association, certainly not the way that Hannibal cashes in on Mark Twain.


I guess that's because Truman himself refused to cash in. Though his finances were often tight (no presidential pension back then), he turned down lots of lucrative offers because he felt they would demean the presidency. Instead he spent his post-White House years writing his memoirs and raising funds to build archives for all his papers: the first presidential library, and some say still the best. I haven't been to the others so I can't compare, but the Truman Library was fascinating. The exhibits on Truman's presidency walk you through a complicated era -- rebuilding Europe, the development of the H-bomb, the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War, McCarthyism, the birth of the civil rights movement -- concisely and yet intelligently, so that even the kids could make sense of it. Poor Truman -- what a world he inherited. And yet he managed to wade through it, making tough decisions and steering a clear course.



Besides the exhibits on the Truman presidency, the Library has preserved Truman's own on-site office, where he met with high-profile visitors from Richard Nixon to Pat Boone, as well as a detailed reproduction of the Oval Office in the White House at the time Truman occupied it. Naturally they have the original desk plaque for which Truman was most famous:



Harry and Bess are buried side by side in the courtyard of the Library, under modest white marble gravestones. (She outlived him by ten years, continuing to live in the family house in Independence.) There are several of his letters to her on display, and it's absorbing to read them -- you sense how much he adored her, and how she kept him grounded.



At one time, Independence was apparently a big deal -- the launching point for wagon trains setting out on the Santa Fe Trail and the homesteading wagons of pioneers hitting the Oregon Trail. In its heyday, Independence had no less than 7 blacksmiths helping folks get geared up for the long road west. We stopped in the National Frontier Trails Museum to get that story, but there wasn't really too much we didn't already know (I did, after all, write a book once on the Pony Express) and we were getting hungry.

Grace went to her first drive-in movie last night, and so today she went to her first drive-in restaurant -- not a drive-through but a drive-in, with carhops and everything. It was just an ordinary Sonic, but a new experience for the kids. Apparently it turned them temporarily goofy.

Back to the hotel, time for a dip in the pool and then a visit to the coin-op laundry in the basement. (Man, how fast the dirty clothes pile up.) Then we went back to the Plaza for dinner, taking a roundabout route that crossed over the state line into Kansas, just so we could say we'd done another state. We drove through Mission Hills -- plenty of choice real estate there, I must say.

I wanted to eat at P.F. Chang's, but Grace held out for the Cheesecake Factory across the street. In my opinion the Cheesecake Factory is the lowest-common-denominator kind of chain restaurant, but there is no arguing with Grace. Happy now, Grace?

Everything's Up to Date

STATE VISITED: Missouri

Today's game -- the Kansas City Royals facing the Chicago White Sox -- was the only day game we'll be seeing on this trip. We walked over from the Holiday Inn just in time for the game, but not in time to get the good giveaway T-shirts at the gate. This was my fault because I wasn't ready to leave in time and so I apologize to my family. (Happy, Hugh?)

Kauffman Stadium -- a.k.a. "The K" -- looks like a spaceport from outside but inside it's a very nice stadium, not too big, with an open side to let in breezes. Considering today's stifling heat and humidity, we were very grateful for that.

As I recall, the Royals name derives from the crown logo on Hallmark Cards, which has its headquarters in K.C. The crown over the jumbotron may look a little hokey, but it's actually fun. Whenever there's a Royals home run, they send up rockets from the prongs of the crown, and the fountains to the right go spouting into the air. The Royals mascot, the king of beasts, wasn't much in evidence today, but in that heat, I can't blame him.

Our seats today were excellent -- on the first base line, only about a dozen rows back from the field -- although I don't think that's the only reason why this game felt more exciting than the last two. Though the White Sox scored the first few runs, the Royals managed to pull ahead, hit by hit by stolen base by hit. The guy to the left, second baseman Alberto Callaspo, got action nearly every time he was up to bat, and also made some great plays in the field. There was only one Royals home run -- hit by Brayan Pena (right) -- which was the first home team homer we've seen on this trip.

With the Royals ahead only by two runs, there was considerable exultation -- flaming videos, the whole bit -- when the Royals closer, Joakin Soria, came trotting out in the ninth to protect their lead. He lived up to his reputation and despatched the remaining White Sox, one two three.

I do love a dominating closer.



After the game, we picked up the car and explored Kansas City. First stop: The Country Club Plaza, America's first shopping mall, a Spanish-themed retail district dating back to 1922. I've always loved the Plaza, even though now most of the shops are chain stores -- Pottery Barn, Urban Outfitters, J. Crew, alongside Tiffany's and Rolex. I kinda like the fact that it's not all Rodeo-Drived beyond the reach of the ordinary suburban shopper.

A gallery of Plaza shots:

















Next stop -- dinner at Arthur Bryant's, the legendary Kansas City barbecue joint. It's down in the historic 18th & Vine District, which has been developed to celebrate K.C.'s jazz heritage. I'm not sure how successful the restoration of this district has been -- although 18th Street itself looked nicely spiffed up -- but Arthur Bryant's hasn't been changed, thank god. Why would anybody change such a classic?







In true barbecue format, there's no table service -- you shuffle along in a slow-moving line, waiting to get to the promised land of the counter, where you shout your order through the window to the guys next to the pit. The line took a while -- Arthur Bryant's is hardly a secret -- but that just meant you could study what everybody else was already eating and decide what you wanted to order. Servings were huge and messy, and all the diners looked pretty damn happy.

While we were waiting we chatted with a couple who were also doing a cross-country drive, but the other direction, from San Francisco to New England. They got a kick out of the fact that we were meeting halfway, in Kansas City, and that we'd both been drawn to Bryant's for some classic barbecue.


We all had various sandwiches; I opted for the burnt ends sandwich, which is chunks of the most succulent pork hacked from the ends of the roast. It may be a little chewier, but it was still meltingly tender, and incredibly flavorful. I'm no barbecue expert, but I know this was heavenly meat. The K.C. barbecue style -- largely due to Mr. Bryant's example -- is a sweet tomato-based sauce, which is basically what I grew up with, so it made me very happy indeed.

Good crisp, crunchy cole slaw too, not too sweet and not overly mayonnaised. I'm very picky about my cole slaw -- I consider it the testing point of a good restaurant. Bryant's' slaw passed the test with flying colors.






The night was still young when we got back to the hotel from dinner, so Bob and Grace and I decided to go to the movies. (I'd been hankering to see this new Johnny Depp movie, Public Enemies, where he plays John Dillinger.) When we got to the closest theater where it was playing, we discovered that it was a drive-in. Man, that was really hitting pay dirt -- I haven't been to a drive-in in years! There are only about a couple hundred left in the country, I think. This one was not only a drive-in but a multiscreen drive-in -- four different screens set in a ring, and you park your car in front of whichever screen is showing the movie you want. The site was pretty run-down -- a potholed asphalt surface with weeds sprouting from the cracks, paint peeling off the white wooden fences -- and with most of the window speakers missing, the sound is now transmitted via your car radio. But, hey, they were showing first-run movies, so it wasn't just worth it for the novelty value. Full-service snack bar and everything.

We enjoyed the movie, although being a Michael Mann picture it had dark jumpy camera work that was a little hard to appreciate on the drive-in screen. (Besides, I had volunteered to watch from the back seat, which meant considerable acrobatics to view the screen between the front seats, under the rear-view mirror, and above the dashboard.) And since it was the Fourth, fireworks kept exploding in the sky behind Johnny Depp's head. But it was a kooky experience, and so reminiscent of my youth at the Shadeland Drive-In. If we'd tried we couldn't have thought up a better way to spend the Fourth of July!

Huck and the Hucksters

STATE VISITED: Missouri


The last time I went up the St. Louis Arch was the year after it opened, when I went with my junior-high church youth group. Needless to say, I hardly remember anything about it, except that I took a picture of the old Busch Stadium with my new Polaroid Swinger camera and it looked like a tiny slide-projector carousel. I think it was just the Arch back then -- just a ride to the top and a look around -- although I could always be wrong.



Now there's a whole complex of things to do at the base -- riverboat tours, two different films, a mock-up of a period general store, and a whole "museum" telling the story of America's westward expansion. I put "museum" in quotes because there aren't many real artifacts, just glossy reproductions and loads of wordy plaques. I suppose if you read all the displays it could occupy you for hours -- but we're on vacation! Who wants to read all the displays? It's enough just to listen to the sonorous speeches delivered by the animatronic characters:








Okay, okay, so the bison didn't talk. That would have been too awesome, wouldn't it?

My favorite bit was the reconstructed sod house. That's like the ultimate frontier dwelling -- "Oh, you think it's cool living in a house made of logs? Well, I live in a house made of dirt." (Hint: Look in the window and you can see Hugh...)

The reality is that this "museum" is just there to occupy you while you're waiting to take the tram to the top. It's crowd control, pure and simple. Once you've been checked in with your time-stamped tram ticket, there's a string of other displays to distract you so you don't get restless while you're waiting in line some more. They're very educational and all that -- but the real reason you're there is to go 600-plus feet in the air, higher than the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument.

The "tram" (a chain of enclosed 5-person pods that are a real challenge for claustrophobics) takes four minutes to reach the top. I think we spent about six minutes looking out the windows and then we decided to go back down. (The ride down takes three minutes -- gravity helps.) There just isn't that much to see once you're up there, at least if you're not from the area and none of the landmarks mean much to you. But just for the record, here's what we saw: (left to right) the old courthouse, Busch Stadium, and the Eads Bridge.









The Eads Bridge is cool because it was St. Louis' first railroad bridge across the Mississippi, and had an innovative cantilevered arch design. The arches of the Eads Bridge are what inspired Eero Saarinen to design the Arch. (See, those time-wasting videos while you're waiting for the tram really do teach you something.) When all is said and done, you have to admit that the Gateway Arch is still a breathtaking monument, that minimalist immense sweep of silver glinting in the sunlight. Nearly half a century old and it still looks post-modern and cool.

I have to admit I was a bit distracted by the presence of dozens of teen-age beauty pageant winners who were swarming around the Arch, all dressed in matching blue T-shirts, white short-shorts, and rhinestone tiaras. I don't think I could ever wear a tiara without giggling, but these girls were completely unself-conscious about it. These girls were born to wear tiaras, apparently.

My kids said not to take pictures of the girls, but I couldn't help it. I figured these are the sort of kids who don't mind having their pictures taken.

We pulled out of St. Louis around noon and headed north, up the river, to Hannibal, Missouri. It was good for a change to get off the interstates and do some blue highways. As we drove through a string of tiny sleepy river towns, Bob remarked that they had "seen better days." Tom begged to differ -- what "better days" had these towns ever seen? I suspect he's right.

Hannibal was worth the drive, though. As a charter member of the Huck Finn Society, I'm a huge Mark Twain fan, and I'd already been twice to the quirky mansion in West Hartford where Clemens -- by then already celebrated as a national literary treasure -- lived at the time he wrote Tom Sawyer. I just had to see the town where Tom Sawyer grew up.

The historic downtown of Hannibal does what it can to capitalize on the Twain connection -- the Becky Thatcher Ice Cream Parlor! The Mark Twain Diner! the Tom Sawyer Dioramas! -- there's even a mustachioed gent in a white suit and a wild gray mane standing on street corners for photo ops. (Signs proclaim that he is not affiliated with the official Mark Twain Boyhood Home organization -- some local dust-up no doubt.) Maybe I should have taken his picture, but it just seemed too obvious.





The old Clemens home is pretty much what you'd expect the local justice of the peace to own: a square white frame house two blocks inland from the ferry landing, just off Main Street. Justice Clemens' law offices (also part of the official site) are right across the street. Note the white board fence to the right of the house -- that's the fence that Tom Sawyer swindles his friends into whitewashing for him in that early chapter of the book.

There didn't seem to be many authentic Clemens possessions inside, so the curators tried to distract visitors with white plaster figures of Twain, posed in the sparsely furnished rooms, as if he were visiting the place in his memory. It's a cool idea but not 100% effective.



Behind the Clemens house, they've built a house that's supposed to be where Huck Finn lived, a copy of the home where young Sam's pal Tom Blankenship, son of the town drunk, grew up. Photos of the old Blankenship shack look appropriately ramshackle, but this place was just built and hardly looks decrepit. They haven't put any furnishings inside yet, either. Huck being one of my favorite characters in all of literature, I did feel a little let down that they haven't yet done him justice here.

I still thought Hannibal was a great side trip to make. It's a fine window into the past, when the Mississippi river was the great artery of the middle of the country. All those neat brick shipfronts lining the main street, the frame houses on side streets climbing the hill -- no village green, no great shade trees, just a fair and open little town clinging to the river. As Bob remarked, it felt distinctly Southern -- Missouri was after all a slave state -- much more so than the hustling port of St. Louis two hours' drive south.

Leaving Hannibal, we cut southwest through a wide swathe of farmland and small county seat towns. One thing we noticed -- this being July 4th weekend -- was that every town had at least one, and often two or three, open-air tents set up selling fireworks, for the local Boy Scouts or Elks Lodge or cancer society or whatever. Tables stacked high with rockets and sparklers and Roman candles of all kinds, and from what we could see, they were doing a brisk business. It seemed impossible to imagine that so many fireworks could be sold in one weekend, but hey, it's the Fourth.

And once we got back on I-70, from Columbia MO on west, we noticed billboards advertising another thriving local line of business. "ADULT XXX Videos DVDs Toys Magazines Lingerie Shoes!!!!" (Shoes -- hunh?) Maybe it's for lonely truckers, maybe this is just a part of the country where there's very little else in the realm of entertainment, but there were sure enough of these billboards for us to wonder. In the interests of journalism, I probably should have gotten off the road to investigate . . . . but, well, the Family Truckster has a moral tone to uphold.