Spencer Art Museum (Lawrence, KS); Following the Oregon Trail from St Marys Mission ; Fort Kearney ; Great Platte River Road Archway

(posted from Pane Bello restaurant, Kearney, NE)
(This post covers 27 – 29 August, 2009)

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Saturday, 29 August-

We left Fairbury (Nebraska) in fog and a light rain this morning but the skies cleared in an hour or so as we turned north to catch I-80 and Kearney.
We reached Fort Kearney State Historical Site by early afternoon. The visitor center’s narrated and automated slide show did a good job of explaining how Ft Kearney had never come under attack but its soldiers had participated in many encounters with Indians. The fort was manned by many different units and after the Civil War some of those units were ‘galvanized Yankees’. I hadn’t heard this term before. It refers to Confederates who had been imprisoned in Union jails and were freed and sent out West as Union soldiers. They were guaranteed they would not have to ever fight against the south and wore Union uniforms in carrying out their missions, typically protecting wagon trains or other such security duty.
Today, good reconstructions of the blacksmith shop and powder-storage bunker help visitors envision what the site looked like in the mid-1800s.
We then drove to the nearby Great Platte River Road Archway for a unique experience. This one may be a little tough to imagine. After buying your tickets, you take an escalator up to the beginning of a series of dioramas and don your earphones. You enter a series of dioramas, each with very life-like figures portraying a portion of a story. The story is told in your headphones as videos and lighting effects dramatize. It sounds a bit hokey but was actually very impressively done, both from storytelling and technical-wizardry perspectives. As we move from room to room we learn the story of the travelers in this area (through which the Oregon, California, Santa Fe Trails, the Overland Stage Trail, the Pony Express Trail, the Transcontinental Railway, the Lincoln Highway, and (now) Interstate 80 passed). Our AAA book gives it a ‘gem’ rating and we have to agree.
We then drove across Kearney to the local version of a Cabelas’ outdoors store. We were quite surprised to see this one looks quite different. The building is a flat, one-story warehouse-style building and though it sells the same gear as the other Cabelas, we couldn’t help but think this version looks more like a Wal-mart. There are some nice animal mounts around but it seemed more like an outlet or discount store.
We only stopped because Labashi wanted to look for a skort. That took all of about three minutes to see that the limited women’s clothing section had nothing even close. I’ve never been a big fan of Cabelas but it’s interesting to me to see what a difference the ‘wow’ factor of the store makes in my view of the merchandise. Today, I was ‘under-wowed’.
We then drove to the Wal-mart to check it out for our overnight. We had supper in the parking lot and shopped for supplies, then checked out a nearby restaurant listed in my wi-fi directory for morning. We’ll have wi-fi and omelets for breakfast tomorrow.
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Friday, 28 August-

Our second night at the Lawrence Wal-mart was noisy. I’m amazed at the number of ‘buzz-bombs’, i.e., small cars with loud, buzzy exhaust systems. And why, pray tell, do they keep zooming around the Wal-mart parking lot? Don’t they have drive-ins to go to? Not that I didn’t try to make some noise with my MGA in high school but at least in those days there was some semblance of a check for excessive noise at inspection time. And inspections were done twice a year back then.
After breakfast we pointed Mocha Joe northwest. We followed the GPS to St Mary’s, planning to see the Indian Pay Station Museum. This was historically the place where the Potowattomie native Americans were paid for their land by the US Government. But unfortunately for us, the museum is only open 1300-1600 and we missed that little detail.
We took a turn through the St. Mary’s Catholic School and noted the boys playing football in their school uniforms of ties and white shirts. The girls of course played separately over at the playground equipment. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just something I didn’t have (uniforms and the separation of the sexes) in my school. It’s actually kind of charming.
We then began following the turn-by-turn directions of the Franzwa book on the Oregon Trail. This took us out of the town of St. Marys on a dirt road. After a few miles of looking for wagon tracks, we came to a little park, the Oregon Trail Nature Park. We elected to walk the ‘Sea of Grasses’ trail which climbed to an overview of a 425-acre lake and, off in the distance, Kansas’ largest coal-burning electric-generation plant. The nature park was part of the price for locating the plant in this area.
The remainder of the trail overlooked the historical course of the Oregon Trail. A silo on the park grounds was painted with four very-well-done murals. Despite the nearby coal-plant, this was a very pleasant little park.
After our walk we lunched in Mocha Joe, then continued on with our search for traces of the Trail. Our book did a good job of leading us to trail crossings but with the prairie grasses so long this time of year, we had a hard time making out more than a dip here and a dip there where there was supposed to be swales.
We had several interesting stops along the way. We visited the site of the crossing of the Red Vermilion River where Louis Vieux lived. Louis was a smart guy. He built a bridge across the river and charged $1 for each rig to be permitted to cross the bridge. The alternative—descending and ascending the steep river banks and dealing with the dangers of the river—was free but risky and time-consuming. Vieux is reputed to have made up to $300 a day at the height of the Oregon Trail emigrations.
Nearby we also visited the ‘cholera graves’. Cholera was one of the great dangers of the journey. Unknown to the emigrants, it was spread from water-source to water-source by the sick. The disease is an intestinal disease and works very quickly. Some were reported to have died within hours of contracting it, others lasted a day or two.
The Red Vermilion ford and bridge was a popular campground. It’s a day’s journey from St Marys and has good wood and water – until cholera struck. In one terrible week, 50 emigrants died there of cholera. Today, there’s a small fenced-in area where three granite field are believed to mark some of the graves.
We followed the turn-by-turn directions until mid-afternoon, finally ending up at Westmoreland, where at nearby Scott Spring there’s a wonderful full-scale sculpture of an ox-drawn Oregon Trail wagon in metal. The wagons are not the massive Conestoga wagons we know of back home in Lancaster County. These are farm wagons with 4 x 10 beds. They seem awfully small and fragile to be hauling a ton of supplies.
We then abandoned the turn-by-turn game and had the GPS lead us to Hollenberg Pony Express Station. This is a state-run historical park featuring a nicely-done trading station and Pony-Express stop. There we talked with some re-enactors preparing for a Pony-Express event this Sunday. We met Jim Sylvester, a (somewhat distant) relative of mountain man Joe Meek.
We then drove to Rock Springs State Historical Site across the Nebraska state line where we had planned to camp for the night. But though our guide book said sites were $10-15, they were $17 AND you had to pay a $4 fee to enter the park. No THANK you, Nebraska.
We drove on to the town of Fairbury for the Wal-mart and spent the evening reading and blogging.

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Thursday, 27 August-

After a nice, quiet night at Chez Wal-Mart, we renewed our supply of ice, then headed to the Lawrence Public Library for a wi-fi connection. Labashi is adjusting to her Mac and I have the trusty old Behemoth (Dell) (and glad of it; it has served me well!).
We caught up on email, I did my Brainiversity thing and uploaded my blog update and still had time to catch up on the online news and do some online research.
One of the problems in traveling as we do is the outdated info on the GPS. I wanted to get some Kansas City-style barbeque and we followed the GPS to three different BBQ restaurants and they’ve all closed! That must be a tough business….
We spent the entire morning at the Library, then drove to the Kansas University campus to visit the Spencer Art Museum. It’s reportedly one of the best University art museums in the country.
Today the special shows were an eclectic collection of modern pieces in Gallery 20/21 (as in crossing from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Centuries (that name probably sounded better a few years ago)). The quality was good but inexplicably the curators chose not to label any of the pieces. We found a gallery guide but its layout was confusing and only the most basic details about the piece. And when many of the pieces make you wonder what they’re about or why the artist decided they were important to do, that’s a bit of a downer.
One piece really stood out, however. We never did find it in the guide but it was a video of a very complex series of physics interactions similar to the ‘Mousetrap’ boardgame. But this one was the most amazing version of that idea we’ve ever seen. It went on for a good ten minutes and kept surprising and delighting us with highly imaginative devices and interactions to keep it going.
In the traditional art galleries, we saw a gem—an exquisite Jean-Leon Gerome painting of two Arab men. Gerome was a popular artist in the late 1800’s and was a mentor to Thomas Eakins (and clearly a great influence on his work). I look for Gerome paintings in every large gallery for his work is some of the most incredible realism I’ve seen.
After the museum we walked across the street to the student union building and walked through the two bookstores there. I was surprised to see a very well-stocked computer-tech section. They had more stock and variety of accessories than the specialized Best Buy stores, both for Mac and Windows platforms.
One of the museum security guards had given me a hot tip on a BBQ restaurant so we drove downtown and had a great plate of baby-back ribs at the Vermont BBQ (they used to be on Vermont Street here in Lawrence). The ribs were just perfect. They’re done with a dry rub and then you have three sauces to sample (and you can therefore control how badly to blow our low-carb diet restrictions). Excellent, excellent choice!
After supper we window-shopped the Massachusetts Street shops.
We really liked the feel of Lawrence. The town clearly has a college-town feel to it also has a friendly vibe. We saw five bookstores and four coffee shops on our little walk this evening and happened upon a poetry reading and a classic film-showing just getting underway. And if Lawrence ever fails to maintain your interest, Kansas City and Topeka are less than an hour away. One could do much worse than to spend a few months or years Lawrence, Toto.
As darkness neared, we headed back to the same Wal-mart for the night.

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