Sunday, October 12, 2014

Hi everyone!

My current desktop photo is a Great Blue Heron doing his victory dance. He had just had a ‘debate’ with another heron over who’s fishing spot this was, and he won. He looks proud, doesn’t he.

Oh my gosh! I hardly know where to start! I have picked out 23 photos to show you this week and I think I’m going to have to whittle that down a little, don’t you?

So I left us lost in St. Louis last week.

Our GPS hasn’t had it’s maps updated for....hmmm....never! And it’s-I don’t know!-six or seven years old. So it’s getting dark, Mike has put in a really big day of driving and he’s getting tired. He gets a little cranky when he’s tired.

“Keep right onto 55 south,” the GPS says. I look up from fooling with my camera or whatever I was doing and I see signs that show 55 south is on the left. Mike follows the voice directions and not the road signs and we ended up in an old manufacturing district of St. Louis. In the distance I see this old Armour plant. Crumbling walls, broken windows, climbing vines all stir my imagination. Unfortunately, between reflections, bug splatters, the waning daylight and Mike yelling at me to get us un-lost, I was never able to get a decent shot of it.

“Peg, how do you know this was an Armour plant?” you ask.

In one of my shots I can see the word Armour painted on one of the smokestacks. “Is this the Armour of the meat packing company?” I show Mike the picture. “Is this how it’s spelled?”

“I think so,” he said.

I know! I know! I hear you! Google it! And I did! I’ll tell you what. I went to the Armour website and clicked on the heritage tab and found out lots of interesting things about Armour!

“Like what?” you ask. Yeah, I bet that’s what you were asking.

Armour was founded in 1867 by a 19-year-old and packed hogs to provide inexpensive meat to the gold miners. Within a couple of years they expanded into beef. As I read the history I was surprised to learn they branched out into fertilizer, glue, buttons and sutures! In 1900 they established Armour Car Lines to ship perishable meats, veggies and fruits in refrigerated railroad cars.

Throughout their history they got into other things as well, like canned milk, soap, talcum powder, tooth paste and face cream.

There’s more-lots more-but I think if you want to know more, you should go check out the heritage tab on their website. However, you won’t get any of the juicy stuff about Armour on their website. If you want to know the more scandalous stuff, check out Armour and Company on wikipedia.org.

We had intended to spend Sunday night in a campground but I couldn’t get anyone on the phone. The last thing we wanted to do was drive into a campground in the dark and not know they could accommodate us or that we could get back out again if we needed to. So we spent the night in a truck stop.

We met up with Cork and Pam (Mike’s brother and sister-in-law) early Monday afternoon on highway 65 just north of Springfield, Missouri.

“Take the lead,” Mike told his older brother on the phone. Cork gave us a blast of his horn as he passed us by.

We spent four days traveling with them and I’ll tell you what! We really packed it in!

Our first night was spent in a really nice state

park in Missouri. We just about had the whole park to ourselves as there was only one other camper in the section we were in. I had a peaceful run the next morning then Pam and Cork made us a wonderful breakfast of eggs, bacon, home fries and toast. Yum!

Our next stop was Ft. Scott, Kansas where we spent a night in Gunn Park. This is a city park and only has 10 or 11 RV sites. When Mike and I were there a few years ago there was a nice lake right across from the camp sites. Well, guess what? They drained the lake!

“What’s the deal with the lake,” I asked a man in passing.

“I’m not sure. They drained it two or three years

ago to put in fishing levies or something,” he told me.

The tree between our camp sites had been struck by lightening. You could trace the rip from the bottom the whole way to the top! It was marked to be cut down. No surprise there, right?

How abut a few facts about Ft. Scott?

Susan B. Anthony was a frequent visitor to Fort Scott to see her brother, John, who managed the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Bat Masterson's brother, Tom, ran the Delmonico Pool Hall in Fort Scott. And Fort Scott is the site of National Cemetery #1, commissioned by President Abraham Lincoln.

You’re learning lots of things today, aren’t you?

Ft. Scott is home to several antique and junk stores and we went through most of them. I think this one is one of the prettiest.

Our next stop was Iola, Kansas to see cousin Suzy. We stayed in a little RV park right there in

Iola and this sign, marking a nature trail tickled us. Cork, along with his dog Bailey and me with Itsy and Ginger walked this little trail. We didn’t see any bugs or snakes or any other dangerous things, but there was lots of poison ivy! Oh, and persimmons. We saw a persimmon tree and Cork ate one. “Not too bad,” he said as he spit out the little seeds, and spit, and spit! LOL! There are lots of little seeds in persimmons.

That night there was a ferocious storm.

I sat outside, at a pik-a-nik table (as Yogi Bear would say it) and took photo after photo trying to capture the lightening strikes.

I was hoping it would be raining for my run in the morning. Iola has an awesome trail! They took out the defunct railroad line and made ‘nature’ trails. This is a bone of contention in the Nichols family, but I won’t get into that just now.

My beautiful niece Yvette loves to run in the rain and I am trying to see the pleasure in it that she sees. I’m trying to do this by running in the rain. First, it has to rain though, don’t you know.

Alas! It was not meant to be. The next morning dawned clear and bright and I went for my run.

--There was stuff!

--There was stuff all over the trail!

--And it crunched!

Leaves, twigs, acorns and the gravel itself all crunched. Acorns can be hard on the ankle, don’t you know, so I decided to keep an eye on the trail.

Then I spot this! Then another and another. They were everywhere just like the salamanders in PA were.

And my heart sinks.

I don’t want to crush any snails under my foot.

I hear you.

I hear you in my head.

“Snails are nasty! They get in my garden and eat all my beautiful plants!”

I don’t care what you say. I don’t want to kill things. Unless you are a fly...

Tick....

Flea....

Or Mosquito!

Then you had better not let me catch you!

I was a little sad that some of the crunches under my foot may have been snails, but I just won’t think about that...

We spent a couple of days in Iola and we went to all the flea markets, antique shops and junk stores that we could find. There is one in particular that used to be a school and it is jam packed with all of those things.

This sign in Booth #28 tickled us. “Sale”, it says in a splash. “25% off. Except Ralph.”

“I wonder who Ralph is,” Pam said. Then we decided to frame Pam.

One of the best things about traveling is trying the local restaurants. We took cousin Suzy out to an Italian place and had calzones and stromboli and alfredo.

It was cool and blustery when we went out to the cemetery. Mike and Cork’s mother is buried there along with a host of other relatives.

As we were driving up to the cemetery we see that there is a new grave. After I snapped off a couple of pictures of the Luby’s standing over mama’s grave, I walked over to see who had passed. It was a lady named Alta and doing the math in my head (luckily it wasn’t all that hard) I figure she was over 100 years old when she died. She didn’t quite make it to 101.

“Peg, on the way to Iola we passed a really cool mill with tin siding on it,” Pam said to me.

“Yeah, I know the one you mean.” It is really cool.

“If you have a picture of it, could you send me a copy?” she asked.

I do have photos of this building. I think I take a picture of it every time we pass it, but I didn’t know how to tell her that I didn’t have a good picture of it.

I know right! Can you believe that?

“There are power lines that your eye can ignore,” I tried to explain, “but the camera can’t. So my photos aren’t that good.”

“Oh, I didn’t notice the power lines,” she said.

I know that Pam really likes that kind of stuff and me being a people pleaser I chased it around in my head until I came up with an answer. “I’ll have Mike stop and I’ll see what I can do,” I told her.

The next day we say goodbye to this very handsome couple and they headed for their home in Las Vegas, Nevada and we headed back to Lake Ozark, Missouri.

Mike found a place to pull off the road and in a light sprinkle, I get out and walk the whole way around the mill, taking photos.

You know something? I think I prefer the shot with the power lines in it to this one. What do you think?

I am going to end this week with a shot of Itsy. I wanted to show you how us country girls do it. We may go out and run and play in the fields and pastures and never care that we didn’t brush our hair.

“Itsy, I have some very bad news for you,” I told her. “We are going back to the city now so we have to start combing our hair and wearing our shoes again.”

Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike