Toto, we're not in Kansas any more

Nope, we’re not in Kansas, we are in Nebraska. Phillip and I made several stops today on the way to our overnight stop at a Days Inn in Grand Island, Nebraska. We began at about 7:45 am with our free breakfast at the hotel. They had a waffle maker, so Phillip was quite happy with our carb-loading start to the day. Our chariot, also known as the SUV, was due for an oil change, so we stopped at an express oil change business just a few blocks from the hotel. We were quite pleased with the service, as the young man who changed the oil knew about cars and talked to Phillip about issues with our high mileage baby. We now know why it uses so much oil (a leaking rear main gasket, but not bad enough to cut short our journey).

Our first sightseeing stop was to visit the Big Well museum in Greensburg, Kansas, about 30 miles from the hotel. It is the largest hand-dug well in the world. It is no longer used as a well, so the townspeople put steps in it and opened a museum. Greensburg is also the site of a 2007 F-5 tornado that literally wiped out the town. The Big Well museum also contains numerous displays about the tornado and the town’s return to life after their devastating loss.  

Our next stop was at the Statue of Liberty. OK, the mini Statue of Liberty that the Boy Scouts built along Highway 281 north of Portis, Kansas. The Boy Scouts did an amazing job with the statue. I tried to text a picture of it to the kids, suggesting to them that we must have made a wrong turn somewhere. However, I had only one bar of signal strength, so I think the picture never made it. The lack of cell service except right in bigger towns is something we didn’t realize. Because of our route thru the countryside, we were without service for most of the day today – and probably will be tomorrow, too. I do have paper maps to rely on, so we won’t get lost in the middle of nowhere.

The most underwhelming site we visited today was the geographic center of the 48 states. A flag and a rock marker about a mile off of Hwy 281 on a farm road. That’s it. Not even a parking lot. We just stopped in the road, but don’t worry, there was no traffic. None.  And we could see why. Soybean fields and corn fields. But…. now we’ve been to the geographic center of the 48 states. I’ll bet not too many people can make that claim!

We saw corn today. Acres and acres of corn fields. Kansas and Nebraska are major corn producers. We saw why the college football team is called the Cornhuskers. So much corn! The most common second crop we saw was soybeans. It appeared that the farmers rotated their fields between corn and soybeans, as we saw some fields where a few corn stalks appeared in the soybean field. In southern Kansas, we also saw beautiful alfalfa fields.

Our favorite stop of the day was just a few miles south of here, the Hastings Museum. I wanted to stop because it is the home of the “Kool-Aid: Discover the Dream” exhibit. Phillip and I highly recommend this museum. It was one of the best museums we’ve been in, and not just for the Kool-Aid exhibit. But first, here’s your lesson about Kool-Aid.

Edwin Perkins was a home chemist who sold patent medicines like gasoline additives and elixirs to stop smoking. One of his most popular concoctions was Fruit Smack, a flavored syrup sold in glass bottles. But the bottles were heavy and they would break during shipment, so he worked on a powdered version of Fruit Smack. In 1927 he succeeded and called the resulting product Fruit-Ade. He soon changed the name to Kool-Ade, then later to Kool-Aid. Perkin’s Kool-Aid outsold all of his other products combined. The exhibit noted that a package of Kool-Aid cost 10 cents until 1933. Because of the Great Depression, Perkins actually dropped the price of his product to 5 cents, a price it kept until 1953. When Perkins’ health began to fail, he sold Kool-Aid to General Foods, who began the marketing campaign with Mr. Kool-Aid and all kinds of product tie-ins. The exhibit had videos of some of the old commercials for Kool-Aid, including the 1970 commercial starring the Monkees! I got a big kick out of watching that one.

 

On to the parts that Phillip liked best, which I think was the entire remainder of the three floors of the museum. Unfortunately, I underestimated how good the museum would be, so we arrived an hour before they closed. We did move thru most of the exhibits, including the stuffed animals that frequent the Great Plains. This picture is of a bison, which is a different animal than the buffalo, although a lot of folks misname them as buffalo. The museum contained many more animal displays.

On another floor, the museum had the most extensive collection of old guns that we had ever seen, long guns, revolvers, Gatling guns, you name it. After we walked thru examining the displays, I noticed labelled drawers under each glass case as we were leaving the area. I pulled open one and we found even more guns,  also under glass, but closer and easier to really look at. So… we scurried back thru the gun exhibit, taking turns pulling out drawers and announcing what we were seeing, with a “Wow, look at this one!”

The museum staff had already announced the closure of the museum when Phillip found an

exhibit with a telephone just like the one that we had bought at an antique store in Galveston. The manufacture date of the one in this museum was 1933. We practically ran by covered wagons and Indian exhibits as we headed to the door so we wouldn’t get locked in. Needless to say, we were the last museum patrons to leave. We could have spent another two hours there, but we really enjoyed what we did see. Tomorrow, more driving and stops as we head northwest thru Nebraska, probably making it into South Dakota by the end of the day.