Installment #12 - Retirement Trip

3-29-06

Our trip to Fort Scott was exciting…just as we started across the railroad tracks, the red lights came one, railroad arms started down and a train on our left….pretty hard to get 30 feet of motorhome and our car across railroad tracks in a hurry! J Walked around Ft. Scott. Saw Veteran’s Memorial with Eisenhower’s name on it and many others. Talked to two men painting posts at the memorial. They were more than happy to give us information about Ft. Scott…Mr. Reed told me the story about the National cemetery we had gone to the night before – how the confederates stones were off-set, not in line, last slap in the face to the confederate soldiers. Saw an e-bay consignment store, music was playing as we walked down the main street of old town Ft. Scott.
Tony got his music fix at Wanda’s home – playing the piano as she played the organ.

Day 52 began with a trip to Union Station (http://www.unionstation.org/). Kansas City has done a great job restoring this building. Saw the "meet me under the clock" clock that has been in Union Station since 1914 – 6.5’ tall, 3’ thick and weighs 1000 pounds. Saw the Liberty Memorial (America’s only national momument for WWI veterans). Next to Crown Center shopping plaza which housed the Hallmark Visitor’s Center….interesting place – displaying artists’ work (Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Sir Winston Churchill); presidential Christmas cards ordered from Hallmark since Eisenhower in 1953; live demonstrations by craftspeople; and Hallmark’s automatic ribbon bow maker (http://hallmarkvisitorscenter.com/)(picture of Wanda and Tony in front of the embossed mural at Hallmark’s entrance hall).

Day 53, still in Kansas City, we went to the Harley Davidson (picture) manufacturing plant (http://www.harley-davidson.com/wcm/Content/Pages/Factory_Tours/kansas_city.jsp?locale=en_US). A very informative tour about Harleys (no cameras allowed in the plant) seeing all the robots thus proving what a soft life the engineers of today seem to have. Two robots were working with each other, one handing the second robot a piece of tube to bend before laying it on a bench. Another robot held a fuel tank while his brother Mig welded it. Another robot sanded the surface of a finished tank, looked at it, didn’t like the job, and sanded it again.

Day 54 we left Kansas City to head towards Omaha, Nebraska. Tony very pleased to see a round-a-bout a few miles northwest of Kansas City. We stopped too long on a road in Leavenworth Kansas (a cop pulled up behind us with lights flashing, only to ask if we were lost). Passed by the U. S. Penitentiary (huge place) – visitors welcome, but we chose not to visit. On to Atchison, Kansas (home of Amelia Earhart) to see the outside train museum (Tony finally got to get up into a steam engine). Drove outside of town to see the one acre earth work portrait of Amelia Earhart (composed of permanent plantings, stone and other natural materials), dedicated to Amelia near the Mount Vernon cemetery (cemetery had a small size Washington monument in the middle) (http://www.lasr.net/pages/city.php?City_ID=KS0701001&VA=Y&Attraction_ID=KS0701001a006).

Next stop was Hiawatha Kansas Mount Hope Cemetery with the Davis Memorial (seems to be our week for cemeteries). Quite an interesting story behind this memorial (http://skyways.lib.ks.us/towns/Hiawatha/davis.html) - eleven life-size statutes made in Italy of Italian marble of Mr. & Mrs. Davis. Town of Hiawatha was not happy that he didn’t leave more to the town; however, now due to features in Newsweek, Life, and People magazines and on a TV version of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, 20-30,000 people from across the U.S. and around the world come as tourists to this small town.

Tony wants it known that "as well as living through a rainstorm that dropped eleven inches of water in one day in Texas, we stayed at a house in Kansas City that was only 25 miles from a tornado. The T.V. advised that people should lay face down in a damned ditch if they were caught out in the tornado." This was a direct quote from Tony. As you can tell, England does not experience such weather changes as we have seen – to date, out extremes on this trip have been 15 to 92 degrees. I want you to know that travelling with Tony has been an experience!