It's been a while since we posted an update. We’ve been very busy with family activities, which aren’t particularly blog worthy but let’s catch you up on what’s been happening.

After driving for four straight days, we arrived in Dallas on July 4th, parked the RV in Corinth, which was the closest RV Park we could find due to the Little League World Series being held in Frisco. After setting up, we headed to the hospital to see my Mom. She has had a miraculous recovery and we found her in good health and ready to go home. Relieved that mom was doing well, we headed to Frisco to watch fireworks with Hunter, Alex and Ashlee. It was a long day, but a good one.

The doctors released mom a few days later with only some short-term memory issues. We stayed with her at her house for a week while our RV was at the dealership for some minor warranty work. Back in April/May, we had toured several retirement communities with Mom, and now she was ready to revisit the ones she liked best. Our first stop was Sunrise of Plano. As fate would have it, they had a great apartment with a wall of widows overlooking a large patio available for immediate occupancy. Mom liked it enough to sign a lease and within five days, with my brother and kids helping, we had her moved in (and over the next 2 weeks we got her settled and the apartment decorated – with the exception of moving her home phone which Verizon has totally screwed up). This accomplishment was almost as miraculous as her recovery. We are so glad she decided she was ready to move and that she was well enough to make choices about where and what to take. It was a lot of hard work and we are really proud of her for braving the unknown. She is happy, closer to family, and making new friends already. Her new apartment is lovely and the residents and staff at Sunrise couldn’t be nicer.

It was great to be home and see family and friends but we were ready to get back on the road again on July 28th. This gave us a week to get to South Dakota for the Sturgis Motorcycle rally. After an overnight in Oklahoma City, we headed for Kansas City hoping to see some of Bill’s work friends and get some cooler weather (which we didn’t get, it felt hotter than Dallas with some stifling humidity).

As we drove into Kansas State along I-35 we were surprised to find toll booths. Both of us were curious (I figured Kansas was just screwing tourists – turns out I was wrong. Sorry Kansas) about how this was possible - an interstate highway with tolls? Google and Wikipedia explained it…some states used their own money to build roads that were later included in the national interstate network. Since Kansas received no federal funds to build the road, they are allowed to charge tolls. Since we have 4 axels, our toll to get to Kansas City was $24.

As we entered Kansas City we got another surprise. We found ourselves on Lamar Hunt Memorial Freeway. Having worked for Caroline Hunt, I thought the Hunts were of Dallas fame, so I looked him up on Wikipedia and discovered he founded the AFL and the MLS, and owned the Dallas Texans, which became the Kansas City Chiefs.

We stayed just outside of town at World of Run RV Park. It is attached to a "Six Flags" like amusement park on the Missouri side of the city. A huge roller coaster was just behind our campsite and when sitting on our back patio we could watch the riders and hear their screaming. We did not visit the amusement park but we did avoid the heat for part of each day at the beautiful campground pool. Another (surprise) benefit of this park was front row seats for World of Fun fireworks on Saturday night. We sat out on our porch and enjoyed the show.

Kansas City is another medium size city with a population around 500,000. Even though we were out in the burbs, it only took 15 – 20 minutes to get everywhere we wanted to go. We never got in a traffic jam, yet Kansas City had everything you would want in a city. We visited the Nelson Art Museum, which was free (thanks for the recommendation Jake). It is in a huge Roman style building set on several acres of lawn. Their collection was extensive and varied with pieces from the great masters, modern art, and international historical collections. They had a set of sculptures by Philip Haas representing the seasons that we really liked. We are not big art museum fans, but we really enjoyed it and will visit again next time we are in KC.

The Arabia Steamboat Museum contains salvage from a steamboat that sank in the Missouri River in 1856. It was loaded with 200 tons of goods ordered and prepaid by merchants upstream. After hitting a tree snag it took several days to sink. Apparently back then they did not try to salvage anything that didn’t float so the boat sank with all cargo still on board (the only life lost was a mule that the owner said was too stubborn to leave but it was actually found during the recovery to still be tied to the railing. The museum named him Lawrence – get it?). Over the years, the Army Corps of Engineers had deepened and redirected the flow of the Missouri River to improve navigability; this meant that the Arabia was actually discovered buried (45 feet deep) in a farmer’s field near the river. The recovery operation occurred in the late 1980’s, 132 years after the Arabia sank. Today they still have 60 tons of salvage to restore, so they are constantly adding to the collection. It was amazing to see the clothing, tools, household goods, medicines, etc. that would have been available in the typical general store of the mid 1800’s.

Kansas City is known as the City of Fountains, and they did seem to have them all over. We toured around checking some of them out, and since they were often in front of prominent buildings, we discovered those too. The convention center has four towers with art deco sculptures on top that hold the building up to allow the freeway to go under it. The Kauffman Performing Arts Center is a very cool building that reminded us of the Sydney Opera House. Union Station was a treat, where we had a wonderful lunch at the Harvey restaurant. Fred Harvey was an entrepreneur who created one of the first restaurant chains when he took over the concessions at a large number of train stations and introduced good consistent food and great service with his Harvey girls.

Bill’s favorite stop was the National WW1 Memorial Museum. The admission price covered entry on two days within a week, which we thought was odd, but discovered the reason. While I enjoyed touring the building, watching the movie and reading the timeline of events leading to the war and the eventual involvement of so many powerful countries, I had had enough after several hours and was ready to get back out into the present world. The extra day allowed Bill to return for a few hours so he could read every sign, and enjoy himself, while I did girlie things (a couple of interesting facts: 1 in 3 French men between 17 and 30 died during the war; by 1918 the daily cost of the war was $96M). It was a very impressive memorial. There are two sphinxes with their wings covering their faces flanking the 200+ foot tall tower. The sphinxes are named Memory and Future. Memory faces east and is hiding his eyes from the horror of wars past, and Future is facing west and hiding his eyes from the unknown of wars to come.

We only managed to get dinner with one of Bill’s friends but it was a great time. They are also RV’ers and motorcyclists and they introduced us to some great Mexican food at one of their favorite local restaurants, El Patron. We highly recommend it if you are in the area. We caught a free screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show in the park one evening, visited the Historic City Market, and went to the Kauffman Memorial Garden one morning. It was a small garden but had lots of bugs to feed our photographic obsession (so prepare for more flower and bug photos), including the coolest bug we have ever seen. I think it was a moth, but have not been able to identify it. It was almost as big as a hummingbird, with a green furry body and orange wings with transparent cutouts in them. Awesome!

There was more to do that we did not get to on this visit, so Kansas City will go on the return trip list (which is getting pretty long). We did not see the Truman Presidential Library, or Powell Gardens. Oh and the Cinemark was $4.40 per person, unless you caught the matinee which was $3.90. Great town, we will be back.

For now, it is off to Sturgis, South Dakota for the 75th Anniversary Rally. We have been planning to attend this event for a full year, so we are excited to be headed that way at last.