Fast Forward: April 26 to May 30

On our last blog entry, we left you at our campgrounds at Great Sand Dunes National Park located near Alamosa, Colorado.

The photo above and the next several photos are meant to show you just a wee bit of what we experienced after departing the Great Sand Dunes and traveling through one more mountain range and one of the most remote stretches of southern Colorado I've ever seen.

We topped out at 9,377 feet heading east through the Sangre de Christo Mountains (one of many ranges that collectively make up the Rocky Mountains). More thin air...never a great experience for Tara:)

And here we go down the eastern slopes...

Then we encountered 75 miles of this...not a rest stop to be had and not even a place to safely pull over. If you had a flat tire out here or a mechanical breakdown you'd have to stop on the roadway...those shoulders were soft and no place for taking a multi-ton motorhome towing a car. It pays to have all your maintenance up-to-date!!! Not to mention a full tank of gas...

Mile after mile...more of the same.

Finally we reached our destination. In this case, a place with a great name, "Lamar Sportsman RV Park and Horse Motel",...in Lamar, Colorado.

The owner of this RV Park is a retired farmer and has a grand collection of old, beat-up Minneapolis-Moline tractors spread all over the grounds...

Here's the back end of one of the 20-30 old tractors available to photograph and climb on if you are so inclined.

After leaving Lamar we crossed the state line from Colorado into Kansas and our next couple of weeks became almost a blur of campgrounds and activities. We stayed in at least three beautiful Kansas State Parks...each one on a state reservoir. Can you see the lake through the trees here?

We visited Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve centered around an 1881 Cattle Ranch in the beautiful Flint Hills of Kansas. This is a fully restored one room school house that opened in 1884 and closed in 1930. Here the children of the early settlers learned reading, writing, arithmetic and...geology. Many inherited their family ranches...many moved on to see the world that they were introduced to right here on the wide open prairie...

Just down the road from the school house was this magnificent limestone ranch house of Stephen Jones...

Then we moved on to visit our daughters and their families in the Kansas City area. This is one of 200 fountains in the city.

We spent an afternoon marveling at contents of the Steamboat Arabia Museum. The Arabia was a steamboat that hit a snag in the Missouri River in 1856 and quickly sank our of sight (the passengers all made it off safely except for one mule). Over the ensuing years the river changed courses many times. In 1988, five enterprising men located the wreck 45 feet under a farm field near the present channel. The boat had settled into the mud and become completely encapsulated. The boat's entire cargo...goods of every description headed for the frontier of 1856...were excavated, conserved and preserved and are now on display here. This picture is just a taste of the cargo...there is hardware of every description, china, cooking utensils, clothing, boots and shoes, etc., etc... If you are ever in Kansas City...this is a must!

We spent another afternoon walking through the National World War I Museum in Kansas City. This is a fine museum...war is not glorified...the war is explained and all who fought in it are memorialized.

We visited Union Station...built in 1913 when the railroad was king. And that is downtown Kansas City in the background...

On our way out of town on our last day in Kansas City we walked all around the new Kaufman Center For The Performing Arts. We were there on the wrong day of the week to get a tour of the inside...hopefully next time.

Since Tara and I are huge fans of college basketball in general and the Kansas Jayhawks in particular (University of Kansas), we stopped in Lawrence, Kansas and visited Phog Allen Field House. Here's Tara posing with Coach Phog Allen himself...yeehaa!

Our route homeward bound has taken us through western Nebraska. Here we are visiting "Carhenge" in Alliance, Nebraska. Yes, these are mostly automobiles from the 1950s through 1970s stacked up to replicate Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain of southern England. I even got a T-shirt from here:)

We stayed in Rapid City, South Dakota for five days over the Memorial Day weekend...first to get off the road and secondly to visit a "cousin" of Tara's by the name of Rosy. Rosy got engaged on her birthday in early May to Ed...and here is their beautiful new ranch house...located in the middle of about 11,000 acres of Ed's cattle ranch.

A view from the house...some of the more than 500 head of cattle...

Rolling on from Rapid City we stopped for two nights at Devils Tower National Monument at Devils Tower, Wyoming. This was one of many landmarks used by the early pioneers to find their way west in the mid-1800s. It is also a very sacred place to native Americans...and this was the site where the movie, Close Encounters of a Third Kind was filmed some years ago. We kept our eyes out for stray aliens but didn't find a one...:-)

Here's our campgrounds at Devils Tower...what a view!!!

From here we are on the road once again...going through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and home to Washington. Since our schedule is completely open...we should be home in Mount Vernon in another week or two...looking forward to it after more than two months on the road.