Team OYB: 1st Week…IL, MO, KS

More Photos Below!Gallery
[2 of 10.] Hi all… We’ve been on the road a few days now. The sweet old car is workin’ fine. The backroads of Illinois and Missouri were nuttin’ to write home about, but Kansas has been rockin’. Lots of folk art things in Kansas. Cute burgers in Salina at the Cozy Inn. We’ve been tenting, sometimes in rain, but last night was a motel. We had inch-big hail as we drove into Colorado.

We’re getting 23mpg. Weather is becoming cool, rainy. We’re eating mostly picnic-stop meals.

No junk food!

Well, no convenience store food. We did get pops at the 2 restaurants we’ve stopped at.

Our theory is that we’ll feel better without candy and cokes on the road. Save money. Gain less weight.

We’re also doing calisthenics whenever take big stops.

It’s been handy that major freeway exits have free internet wifi in the hotel parking lots.

The highlight so far was the Garden of Eden in Lucas, KS. It’s a small town 15 miles north of I-70 in mid-Kansas. The whole town is going gung-ho for folk art. They also have a restored Community Theater. We missed out on the local homemade boloney and sausage because the shop just closed. The Garden of Eden was built as a tourist attraction 50 years ago by a guy who married a 20 year old looker when he was 80 and started a 2nd family of 2 more kids with her. The gift shop sold lots of neat things including bottled water that said “There must be something in the water.” His cement creations tell the Bible story then they move on to Populist political issues. Lots of things in mid Kansas are built out of this 10-inch thick layer of “post rock” limestone that covers millions of acres. www.garden-of-eden-lucas-kansas.com/

We also had a great visit at Paul Boyer’s museum of animated wood carvings in Belleville, KS. Henry said it was his favorite thing of the whole trip. At age 13 Boyer started making wood carvings come to life with little cogs and wires and he kept it up ever since, steadily developing his skill. His daughter came and opened the museum for us. It really is amazing. His works can have a dozen little figures moving on a table-top but there will also be a window cut into the mechanism base so you can see how all the little gears work. He also works with air-currents and music and just plain wire. I’ll put up a report with pics and vid’s elsewhere here at OYB. There are also plenty of YouTubes about him. Here’s a listing: www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/16332.

Here’s a little vid of one of his machines:

We stopped at Al’s Chickenette for fried chicken in west Kansas as suggested by Roadfood.com. Terrible. That Roadfood has let us down many times. It’s trying to make something of bad stuff. Al’s had a nice neon sign but that’s all. The flyover hinterlands can do a lot better than that, I’m sure! …I sure hope so, anyway. There is a sense of most everything going bad out here, of nothing good lasting.

There don’t seem to be any good old steak houses in Kansas or Missouri anymore. No dry-aged beef served anywhere that I could google up. Oh, Kansas City had a couple swanky places, but that’s just one town. I did read that KS exports a whole lot of dry-aged. Guess they prefer chicken themselves—we did see that being bragged up. Along with buffets. And cheapness. A tawdry cheapness that outlasts our days, I suppose. You’d think there’d be a little room still left for a dark, old dining room… (Maybe we can stop at Johnnies in Omaha on our way home. Or, I also heard there’s a dry-aged place in Grand Island.)

This hotel parking lot wifi hotspot worked great, but I gotta drive!

…Hoping to visit Boulder next. (We’re in Limon, CO, now.)

UPDATE FOR 7/7/09: Pics ahoy! (They’re going to be a bit out of order, but what can ya do…)

But, first, here’s a little video of our domestic driving arrangement:

Now for the pics…

Here’s our first night, at a campground on the Missouri River.

Here’s a little functional folk art…

A good-looking row of tractors in Missouri.

Stumbled onto this lady’s folk art house on a Missouri backroad. (That’s a goose Santa outfit.)

Lucy bought a cement duckling, $3.

The Davis Family Memorial in Hiawatha, Kansas. He had sculptures made of him and his wife at different times of life. They dropped off one by one (he lost a hand first, though).

The first moving sculpture that Paul Boyer made, at age 13… (Belleville, KS)

Dinsmoor, of “The Garden of Eden” (Lucas, KS) remarried a 20-something at age 80 and had 2 more kids…

Another art house in Lucas, KS…

Henry likes the Dino-Barbies… (officially called ReBarbs, I think)

Here’s one…

And another. (Martha didn’t approve.)

This one caught my eye.

I liked the cow bones folk art at the Lucas, KS, museum.

Now, more pics, with different caption formatting (whatever…)

Tiny burger family.

Friendly young person makes 1500 miniburgers a day.

Lucy outside the Cozy Inn, a 100 year old hole in the wall with 6 stools that serves just one thing, a tiny burger fried with chopped onions. Salina, KS.