2022 KC/MI Wander: Kansas City

Days 4, 5 and 6

 This is the fourth installment of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

Day Four of my trip, Friday, began with a walk up the street to a breakfast place we'd passed the previous evening on the way to dinner on Main Street. I was seated next to a very young couple who were engaged in a group phone conversation with some guy in what sounded like a techno-chic night club. Or maybe he just liked to blast dance music in the background. Whichever: the young couple could only overcome the noise from his location by shouting into the phone about their gym routines. I had to move to another table, where I was made privy to the thoughts of a 73-year-old woman who likes dirty martinis and has some unpleasant thoughts about sexual practices in West Africa. Fortunately, live voices are easier to tune out.

The food was good, the coffee not so much. Service excellent, values not so much. Overall I'd give the place an average rating, two and a half jalapeños out of five. 

National Toy & Miniatures Museum

After going back to the house and writing up my blog post from Day 3, I walked over to the National Toy and Miniature Museum, about three blocks away. The museum was started when two wealthy old KC women decided to pool their collections. One collected miniatures, the other collected toys. The museum has toys on the second floor, miniatures on the first, though naturally there's some overlap, especially when it comes to doll houses.

The attraction of the upper floor was, of course, the nostalgia of seeing things I used to play with locked up in plexiglass cabinets where they couldn't be played with: the Lockheed Constellation model airplane, the Marx Garage, &c. I pretty much skipped over the doll exhibits, and I was disappointed to find an entire cabinet of Hot Wheels cars, but not a single Matchbox. (We die-cast model snobs disparage Hot Wheels as morally and physically inferior to the Matchbox models.) But there was an old video of the Matchbox manufacturing process produced by Lesney, the company that made the toys (starting in 1952, I learned, with a model of Queen Elizabeth's coronation coach). 

But it was the miniatures on the first floor that are really the heart of this museum. They were astounding. 

nesting tables 1" x 1.5"

The miniatures museuem I visited in Victoria, British Columbia a few years ago had dioramas of great scenes created with phenomenal detail: battles, a dogfight, a car show, circus parades. I was expecting, even hoping for something similar. But instead I found thousands upon thousands of items rendered in perfect tiny proportion. And while they were often arranged in complete sets -- Art Deco Jewelry Store; Country Cottage; Anteroom in the Doge's Palace -- the main thrust of the museum was educational, showing how these incredible items are created. The exhibits highlight the special tools used, the techniques applied, the various stages of production. In one room, I got to try putting the hands on a miniature grandfather clock with a pair of tweezers. The first hand went on easily; the second took me a dozen tries, and I wasted a lot of time looking for it after it squirted out of the tweezers' grasp.

table & chair, full-sized & miniature

captain's chair on a pin

Probably the most fascinating item was a copy, in miniature, of a writing desk from the palace at Versailles. The model is only about six inches across, but it perfectly duplicates the full-sized furniture, right down to the gold leaf decoration, the inlaid roll-top (including the entire brass mechanism), the dovetail drawers, the complex lock, and the mechanism that enables the writing desk to double as a reading stand. There was a documentary film, engaging despite its leisurely pacing, showing how the piece was made.

There were miniature copies -- apparently perfect copies -- of oil paintings; there were porcelain figurines and dishes and vases; there were candles and chandeliers and kitchen tools, even tiny flowers and food and animals, all of them perfect in every detail. The result of these collections is absolutely breathtaking.

When I left the museum it was mid-afternoon and much hotter than I cared for. I briefly considered going to the Nelson-Atkins Museum, or driving around the city checking out other locations I'd marked to visit on RoadTrippers; but after walking back to the house, I decided instead to settle on the back porch with a glass of ice water, my computer (to start putting down these thoughts) and my cellphone.

I found that relaxing.

Saturday (Day 5 of the trip) was set aside for a visit with my friend Marty, who lives out in Olathe, a suburb of the city in Kansas. His house isn't far from the Kansas City Automotive Museum, and he expressed an interest in going there with me. Perfect. 

Since he works nights and doesn't usually get up until around ten in the morning, we planned for me to come by his house and fetch him a little after that; then we'd have brunch and go to the museum together. Easier said than done: every decent breakfast place in the area had long wait times. At the third restaurant we checked, with a 25-minute wait, I said let's just wait. If we'd waited at the first one we'd gone to, we'd have already eaten by then. But by the third restaurant we were both a lot more desperate and a lot less proud. I had gone out to an ATM that morning and stopped for really good coffee at a convenience store I'd passed on the way, and had thought about getting something to tide me over (this was around 7:30AM) but decided not to. Since I expected to eat around 10:30, I figured there was no need. In the event, it was about 11:15 before we finally sat down at a restaurant table. We had a good breakfast -- I had eggs benedict and coffee, lots of coffee -- and sat talking well into the afternoon. 

So we didn't get to the museum until around 2pm. It's not a large museum, but it's an interesting one. It has special shows, a different one every month, and most unfortunately, their Jaguar Month is September. If only I"d known. When we pulled up and went inside, they immediately started trying to convince me to leave my car in their museum for the month. "We haven't got any newer Jag models lined up yet for the show." Too bad, I said, because this car will be in Michigan by the first of September.

1954 Lincoln

Among the unusual cars they had on display were a 1925 Jordan, similar (I've been told) to the one my grandfather drove; a 1954 Lincoln, a rarity in car museums; a 1935 Bentley 3.5-litre saloon; an Essex Super Six; and a 1957 Chrysler Imperial Crown convertible. All the cars were fully restored and beautifully presented, although the lighting in the museum is fairly harsh and my photos are, as a result, mostly overexposed and filled with glare spots. There was also a 1957 Messerschmidt two-seat tandem car, which prompted a long conversation about postwar industrial recovery in Europe and Japan, and the persistence of rationing in Britain. 

1939 Racine Ford

But the most interesting car was something that, normally, I wouldn't have bothered with: it was, according to the sign, a 1939 Racine Ford -- not something I'd ever heard of, and I suspect that it's actually a fairly recent artifact. It was built using parts from a number of cars, ranging from a 1934 Ford, a Jaguar, an MG, and several others. All these odd parts were cobbled together by various local mechanics (a complete list of the parts and the builders was given on the accompanying sign) into one of the most attractive 1930s-Style vehicles I've seen outside of the top car museums.

Marty and I spent about an hour at the museum, and another hour or so sitting outside talking. Just before we left I went back in to toss some trash, and an older man who hadn't been privy to our conversation on arrival immediately set to work trying to get my Jag into their Jaguar Month show. I spent about 20 minutes talking with him and the other three museum employees about which cars are the most beautiful (and which aren't): Jaguars in general, yes; Jaguar XK-150s, no; Delahayes in general, yes; Bugatti Atlantics ... we agreed to disagree. 

In any case, I'm now up to seven "nice car" comments, including Marty, who gushed. He'd expected me to be driving my Subaru (because I was bringing the stained glass panels up). But while bringing up the glass is the Official Reason for this trip, the convertible is the Real Reason.

Speaking of stained glass: while I was out in Olathe, the panels got hung up at David's house. (The installation had been delayed because the hooks originally bought for the hanging were only rated at 4 pounds each, and the center panel weighs almost 10 pounds, so bigger hooks were needed.) Since this installation is the Official Reason for the trip, I guess I should mention that it's been accomplished, and show the result. So:

Ginko Triptych, Installed

We had dinner down at an Italian restaurant in The Plaza, a shopping district built in the 1920s and famous for two things: (1) being the first shopping center designed for cars (there are parking garages hidden all over the 6-block area) and (2) a plethora of public art. I have photos from a previous trip of a magnificent fountain at the eastern end of the Plaza with several monumental bronze statues in it; this time we were at the western end, where the statues are more modest, and whimsical. After dinner, we strolled around the area for a while, as David pointed out where everything used to be. Seems the tenancy of the Plaza has been extremely fluid in the past few years; not really a surprise, but it always promotes a certain feeling of regret-tinged nostalgia when important parts of your home town go through big changes. I feel the same way whenever a longtime River Walk business folds or moves away, and when some national chain takes over a space that, morally, should have a tenant with a local connection.

Sunday (Day 6) started off with pouring rain. I started my laundry and then sat on the back porch, pondering coffee sources until there was a lull in the downpour. I rushed out to a convenience store a mile and a half north, filled their biggest cup, and brought it back to the house. By the time I moved my laundry from the washer to the dryer, it was plain that the lull in the rain would be lasting for some time. So I found a place for breakfast called the Neighborhood Cafe, three miles south, and went there. Four and a half jalapeños. Had a good-enough breakfast burrito, and more coffee; but the best things about the place were (a) the prices; (b) the lagniappe (hot-from-the-oven cinnamon rolls); (3) the service; and (d) they had the Forest:Spurs match on the TV over the counter. I was tempted to remain until full time, but I had laundry in the dryer.

I spent the entire afternoon at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. The best part of that museum is that it's free, so I don't feel like I have to see everything in order to get my money's worth. That's really a good thing: I don't know how many times I've gone, and I have never seen even half of it. I had gotten there around noon, figuring I'd spend, oh, a couple of hours and then go for a late lunch. Instead I was there until closing, in which time I saw about 2/3 of one floor. (I don't even know how many floors they have; at least two, probably more.) I spent a pretty good chunk of that time considering a single painting, John the Baptist in the Wilderness, painted in the 1500s by Caravaggio. I'd seen it for the first time years ago at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, but the Nelson-Atkins is its home. It is, to me, one of the most enigmatic and important paintings in the entire history of art. 

I managed to get all the way to the medieval cloister at the western end of that floor -- the Plaza Level -- and around the corner to the Assyrian and Egyptian art section before closing time. I find so much of interest there that I had never before gotten that far along that floor. On this occasion I spent a good bit of time with French porcelain and Italian Baroque -- did not see a single English painting on this visit -- and who'd'a ever have thunk it? They have a section on stained glass! Wonders never cease. 

It didn't even occur to me to have lunch. Now, that's engagement.

Well, now: my wandering resumes tomorrow morning, destination Nebraska. I might even get as far as the Iowa border. The chance of rain predicted for tomorrow is the same as it was this morning, but I"m hoping it moves off to the east. Fingers, once again, crossed.

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2022 KC/MI Trip: Day 3

 This is the third post in a series. You really should read them in order, so here's a link to Part One. And here's a link to all the pictures from this trip, should your anal-retentiveness or OCD require it.

One thing I can never hear too often on these long cross-country wanders is the phrase "Nice car." I've heard it four times so far, a little more than once a day. Just enough to satisfy. First time was on day one, while I waited for the engine to cool enough for me to pour some water into the coolant reservoir. A woman filling her gas tank thirty feet away shouted it. I shouted "thanks" back to her, and only later noted that she, too, drove a Jaguar. But hers was a later-model XK -- the version that supplanted mine in the Jaguar line. I thought briefly about complimenting her car, if belatedly, but couldn't bring myself to do it: the XK is a bulbous, overinflated version of the svelte XK-8, and I just don't much like its aggressive looks. 

Yesterday -- Thursday, day 3 of this trip -- I had set my alarm for 6AM on my phone, then woke up at about 5:58AM, wondering what time it was. I'd had a hard time getting to sleep and had ended up on the computer, practicing my timewasting techniques, until probably 1:30 in the morning. So I was sure I'd slept through the alarm, or else that it was only 3AM. But as I went across the room to check the time, the alarm started beeping, making me feel like a real-life version of Jack Reacher, the Lee Child character who can set his internal alarm clock with just that sort of precision. 

I was in the car -- top down under pristine sky -- by 6:30, and then in the parking lot of a local breakfast place called Jimmy's Egg five minutes later. I had what they call the Garbage Breakfast: eggs with a little of this and a little of that, all kind of dry but satisfying enough. The coffee was good and the service was better than good, so I was happy. 

I drove up the road to start my planned route with the Flint Hills Scenic Drive, along State Highway 177 from Cassoday to Council Grove, a distance of just over 50 miles. Along the way I'd planned to stop at a belvedere south of Cottonwood Falls; at a small waterfall near a reservoir; and at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve north of Strong City. It didn't work out that way.

For starters, Highway 177 is under construction, being re-paved with a new asphalt surface. The work has just begun, and only a stretch of about a tenth of a mile has any actual work being done on it; but the vehicles involved in ferrying materials back and forth are being marshalled at the belvedere 15 miles up the road, and so that entire stretch of highway is marked down to a single lane, requiring a pilot truck to escort travellers through the construction zone. I pulled up to the flagman at the south end of the zone not long after the pilot had left on a northward run, so I had time to get out and spend half an hour or so chatting with the flagger, a Texas boy from Jacksonville who'd come to Kansas for his father's wedding, and met the love of his life. Long story short, he's still here.

The driver of the pilot truck came back ("Nice car! What is it? That's a Jaguar? Looks really nice.") and was replaced by my flagger friend, who led me at breakneck speed past the belvedere where I'd planned to stop -- it was full of dump trucks and graders so I couldn't have stopped anyway, but I could tell from the view beyond it that it wouldn't really have been worthwhile anyway -- to the end of the construction zone in Cottonwood Falls, where I turned off to go to Chase Lake to see the waterfall. Chase Lake is a small reservoir, and just below the earthen dam the creek drops, oh, maybe six feet. I couldn't get to it. The dam is fenced off and the creek exits the reservoir at the farther end, so I just watched the play of sun on water for a few minutes before heading (slowly) back down the gravel road to the highway. 

Masai Mara, 2008: feel that feeling

The Flint Hills are unimpressive bulges in the landscape, mostly covered in grass and livestock, pretty enough to be comforting as background scenery but not so photogenic as to warrant stopping for pictures. I can read the comments of people who have made the stops I'd included in my itinerary, comments about how small the landscape makes one feel, and remember feeling that feeling at various places in the Great Plains (and elsewhere) over the years. I didn't feel inclined to experience it yet again. So I put the next destination into my GPS and headed off. 

 

The Buster Keaton Museum

That next destination was the Buster Keaton Museum in Piqua (pronounced "Pick-way"), Kansas. It turns out to be a tiny room in the office of Rural Water District #1, just off the highway. I drove around the tiny town two or three times before I saw the little "Buster Keaton, Silent Film Star 1895-1966" sign mounted on the side of the building. The Water District employee inside told me that in 1895, a big storm forced a passing train to stop in town unexpectedly; Mrs Keaton, a passenger on that train, chose that time to go into labour, and so Buster acquired Piqua as a point of origin. He stayed two days in the town before heading off to great fame and fortune in Hollywood, though he did come back later in life to acknowledge the little community's celebrations of him as its own claim to reflected fame. The museum contains a couple of cases of memorabilia and hundreds of 8x10 photos, movie posters, letters and newspaper clippings. I mainly found it interesting for what it says about Us, the general public, and our desire to cultivate imagined relationships with people who accomplish anything noteworthy in life. 

On the way to my next stop I finished listening to the Ron & Clint Howard book and started up a series of Great Subjects lectures on the American Revolution, bite-sized talks that covers the Big Event from the French and Indian War to, presumably, the Treaty of Paris. (I've heard 4 or 5 of the lectures so far, and am just up to the encirclement of General Gage in Boston following the Shot Heard 'Round the World.)

The next stop was in Osawatomie, Kansas, in a park at the confluence of the Osage and Pottawatomie rivers -- creeks, really, that immediately flow into the Marais des Cygnes River less than a mile away. That park was the scene of the largest single battle in the Bleeding Kansas phase of American history, when pro- and anti-slavery people flooded into the Kansas Territory ahead of a vote on whether the South's Peculiar Institution would be a part of the future state's legacy. (It was not.) John Brown, later to gain fame for an unsuccessful raid on the US Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia before moulderin' in his grave in North Elba, New York, came as part of that influx of voters, and after the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery forces, he got up a bunch of anti-slavery settlers and retaliated with the Pottawatomie Massacre. Things got ugly, and confused, and so I'll leave you, reader, to your own researches on the subject. The park in Osawatomie contains the cabin of the Adair family, relatives of Brown's. He "hid out" in plain sight there for a couple of years before going on to greater acclaim or notoriety at Harpers Ferry.

John Brown

 In this (hopefully) post-Trump era of Proud Boys and anti-Constitutional insurrection, it's hard to know whether Brown should be condemned or praised for his role in provoking the Civil War. He was convicted of treason following the Harpers Ferry raid, and executed. But a part of his legacy is that slavery is gone, and the Union lives on. Those are good things. But slavery in this country was not talked to death; it only drowned in the blood of hundreds of thousands of people. And its end is not a solution to our problems as a society, only a big step along the road to the general Welfare of a more perfect Union.

Okay, end of sermon. After a short nap in the shade of a tree near the Adair Cabin (which is enclosed for preservation in a slightly larger rock building) I drove on to Kansas City, where the temperature surpassed my limit of 94 degrees and forced me to put the top up for the last fifteen or twenty minutes. I probably won't put up nightly posts while I'm in KC, but will try to do a single all-encompassing description of my time here before I leave on Monday.

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2022 KC/MI Trip, Day 2

This is Part Two of the blog post for the trip to Kansas City and Michigan. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to Part One. And here, for what it's worth, is a link to all the pictures from this trip.

 I know you're seething with curiosity, so I'll tell you that, Yes, I did find some good eats in Bowie: at a Tex-Mex restaurant that turned out (despite Google Map's prediction of how long it'd take to get there) to be right across the street from my hotel. Brisket enchiladas with rice and charro beans, and a salsa crema to which I added a mild salsa picante. And a really big frozen margarita that made me really glad that I only had to drive, oh, a hundred yards to get back to my room.

I'll also mention one thing I forgot from yesterday: another bust. In the town of Aurora, Texas, there was supposed to be the grave of a space alien. I found it on Roadside America. I went there. When I got there, I found a fairly large cemetery, so I looked up the listing to see if it showed where in the cemetery this space alien's grave was supposed to be. Really wish I'd read through all the comments before driving out there, because several comments mention the fact that the grave marker had been removed. Nothing to see. Well, that kind of puts the cherry on yesterday's wandering, doesn't it.

So: today. First thing, I put the top down. There were lots of clouds, but they were the light, puffy kind that held no threat of rain. I had breakfast in a restaurant next door to my hotel -- Longhorn Cafe, I want to say: excellent service, good food, good prices, very popular with the locals, who gather in large groups to discuss local concerns. Not a "Trump 2024" sign in sight. (In fact, I've yet to see that sort of sign anywhere along this trip so far. Considering how often I see it to the west of San Antonio -- like in Arizona -- that's surprising.) These people seem to have returned to norbal.

I get to my first stop, the Horton Car Museum in Nocona, just as they open at 9AM. I didn't expect to spend more than an hour there, because I knew from online information that it was "mostly Corvettes," and while Corvettes are pretty -- at least up to about 1990 -- they're not that uncommon. Okay, the earliest Vettes, from the '50s, are a rare sight, but I've seen so many, in so many museums, that I don't figure they will hold much charm for me yet again.

Turns out they're more interesting when massed like this. There are about 45 'Vettes in a single room, arranged pretty much chronologically from 1953 on. I notice that the '53 Vette is pretty sloppily put together: lines don't align, gaps are uneven, and there's one small chrome part that seems to have a piece of painted metal ripped away from some other surface adhering to it. I'm informed by the curator that it's because the 1953 models were all hand built; the 1954 models, which are identical, were built on an assembly line and the fit and finish is much better. There's a 1954 model right next to the '53, and that's obviously true.

The smallest room in the museum is given over to about 10 vehicles, almost all Chevrolets. The '58 and the '61 interest me but, again, these are cars that I see all over the country, in and out of museums. And besides, the lighting in that room and the arrangement of the cars are such that I can't get a good picture of any of them. The rest of those cars are generally uninteresting to me.

Then there's the back room: large, with dozens of cars of all sorts arranged in groups of 2 or 4, so that it's possible to see all sides of each car. And the lighting is better, too. I spent much longer in that room than in the others. Many of the cars are in that same category of almost commonplace: Mustangs and GTOs and Road Runners and Barracudas -- muscle cars -- are neat to look at, and fond memories abound (especially when I get to the 1970 Chevelle SS'es along the far wall) but they're not worth photographing yet again. I've already got those pictures.

But there are also a number of cars in that back room that I haven't seen frequently in other museums; some I've never seen before. The 1940 Lincoln Zephyr, a really funny-looking car that looks like it got stuck in an extruder. The 1951 Lincoln Cosmopolitan, a peculiarly ugly and chubby-looking luxury car. A 1931 Packard dual-cowl phaeton -- a type of car that has always fascinated me, ever since my days of playing with Matchbox cars. 

Coming out of the Horton museum after two hours, the clouds to the north and east had turned ominous, so I left the top up for a couple of hours. Looking at my itinerary, I decided to skip my next planned stop, at Turner Falls in Davis, Oklahoma, because a couple of recent reviews of the place pointed out that the $15 entry fee was pretty steep for what you got. So I plugged in the next planned stop and headed off.

After lunch -- of Arbuckle Fried Pies (one Tex-Mex, one spinach & mushroom) and a chat with an elderly couple from Kent, England, who were touring the country in a rental car -- and a couple of hours' driving (during which I gor exactly three drops of rain on my windshield, so the top came down again), I stopped for a break and, while I stretched my legs, I decided to look ahead to the other planned stops. Doing some quick mental calculations, I realized that (1) my next stop at a museum in Sapulpa, Oklahoma would be at its closing time, and (2) the the remaining stops in Oklahoma would require me to sit around waiting until 11AM tomorrow at the earliest for access. So I said to myself, Self (I said), let's just go on to Kansas. I said, You can look at your paper maps and decide where-all you want to go; get a big-picture view. That's when I realized that I'd left all my paper maps, with their carefully highlighted routes marked out from Texas to Michigan and back, sitting on top of my Windows computer back in San Antonio. AND I'd left behind my old beat-up Rand McNally Road Atlas of the USA because I didn't need it; I had those paper maps.

So I have no big-picture resource at the moment. That caused me a little difficulty this evening when I tried booking a cheap motel in El Dorado, Kansas, and found that, because I was using that tiny little cellphone screen, I'd plugged in a motel in Wichita instead. Not that far distant, but still out of my way. So I stopped at a Wendy's in whatever town I was in at the time, and called for a reservation by phone instead. 

I see a visit to the AAA office in Kansas City in my not-too-distant future, for a new set of paper maps. They won't have the routes highlighted, but at least I'll be able to change plans with greater comfort. 

I blame my wife, of course, for my having left the maps behind. I'm not saying it's her fault, just that I blame her. 

So how to explain the way I feel about today's drive? I feel something akin to joy. Yes, my plan was a near-total bust. I'll not see the car museum in Sapulpa, or the Deco architecture of Tulsa, or the Healing Stone, and I'll have to get my Superman ice cream in Michigan or somewhere like that; and I didn't see the Indians On The Hill or Bluestem Falls or Greenville Avenue. But today's drive was a joy, top-down on mostly small country roads listening to Ron and Clint Howard talk about their childhood. (Clint's voice is a little deeper than Ron's, and on my radio it's kind of hard to hear him speak. At one point I thought he said, talking of someone he worked with on a TV show, "he was accurately known as Fat Dick." I wondered how anyone would know that. Then I heard him say it again, and realized it was "Fat Jack," so presumably he was talking about the man's weight problem, not his endowment.) (I really should take some time to review the equalizer settings on my radio; maybe I'll do that in KC, now that I expect to have an extra day there.)

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2022 KC/MI Wander: Not the Best Start

 My first wander of the year! Finally! I've so been looking forward to this. The itch to hit the road and move around the country, see places and things I've never seen before, has been growing every day. I've spent enjoyable hours on line, looking for increasingly trivial things along the way, and now it's finally here! I'm all a-twitter.

I knew yesterday that the weather today would alternate between heavy clouds and rain, and so it did. The top stayed up all day, but I didn't especially mind. The rain, when there was rain, was mostly brief, and light. The only time it was at all substantial, I was indoors. So one thing went at least well enough.

I left the house about 7:30 this morning. Could have gotten away earlier, at my intended 7AM, but as the time approached, it didn't seem to matter much. I have, after all, four days allotted to get to Kansas City, so no big deal. I headed up San Pedro, opting for city streets instead of freeway until the Avenue merged with Highway 281 outside the loop. Within about twenty minutes I was past the Death Loop (1604), noticing the progress made in extending the freeway northward. They've opened about 3 or 4 more miles of it since I was last out that way. Then a few miles of construction, then back to the old one-sometimes-two-lane highway. After stopping for a convenience-store taco and a final cup of coffee, I put an audiobook on, and turned on the Navigation function of Roadtrippers, my preferred travel-planning app. The cultured British voice said, "In half a mile, take the slip road on the left." (A slip road, apparently, is an English term for a freeway entrance ramp, though why it's started calling them that in the past few months, instead of "entrance ramp," which it used to call them, I don't know. But it does make me feel just a tiny bit more sophisticated to hear it called a slip road, and know what that means.) 

That was, alas, the last I heard from her until, ten hours later, as I approached my hotel, she blurted out, "In half a mile, continue straight"; and then "In 100 yards, your destination is on the left." Really could have used that kind of direction earlier in the day (though I didn't miss any turns this time; but there was one that was kind of last-second. Luckily, the guy behind me was making the same turn and was giving me room to slow down suddenly). 

My first planned stop was just shy of Marble Falls, at a place called Dead Man's Hole.This was, apparently, a popular place to throw the dead bodies of political opponents in the 19th Century. According to the marker, the hole is more than 150 feet deep and 50 feet long, and the remains of 17 people, mostly Union sympathizers, were found in it when it was finally explored in 1951.  It is now filled in because of "dangerous gases." So not really anything to see here.

At this point I decided another taco was called for. I stopped at another convenience store (really a bathroom break, but tacos -- even convenience-store tacos -- always take top billing). As I pulled out of the parking lot to resume my trip, the red warning light came on to tell me the engine coolant was low. This had happened once before, back in March when I'd gotten my roof mechanism fixed. This car takes some special kind of coolant (naturally) that's not readily available, and has to be mixed 50/50 with distilled water. I'd looked on line and found that small amounts of regular water can be used safely. I had, of course, no coolant available, and no distilled water, so I pulled back into the convenience store and bought a bottle of purified drinking water. Then I had to wait for the reservoir cap to cool off enough to open it without it spewing all over and scalding me. Thiat took maybe ten minutes.

When I opened it, it was full. Just like last time: the fluid level was all the way up to the top. So just like last time I poured a tiny bit of water in until it slopped over the reservoir, and replaced the cap. Magically, again, the sensor is satisfied. I am not. When I get home, that's going to get looked at.

My second planned stop was even more of a bust: the World's Largest Spur, in Lampasas. I saw it from the road and decided it didn't warrant so much as a left turn and a one-minute stop for a photo. If you have some unaccountable hankering to see what the world's largest spur looks like, visit RoadsideAmerica.com. 

Continuing on down the road, I got to my next planned stop, a car museum in De Leon. According to Automotive Museum Guide, it's open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10AM to 4PM; I checked with the museum a couple of weeks ago to verify that, and learned that in fact they close for lunch from noon to 1pm. I'd gotten to town just before noon, so I took the opportunity to indulge in a little solid food myself, with a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich and sweet potato fries at the Blue Moon Cafe on Main Street. The sandwich wasn't bad; the fries were excellent. I felt like I'd made my first good choice of the day. After a relaxing meal, I moved five blocks north on Main Street to the museum ... which has changed its hours again, and now doesn't re-open from siesta until 2pm.

I only really rue the change because it was the fact that this museum isn't open on Mondays that made me start my trip today, Tuesday. Now I feel like the Terrill Automotive Museum kind of owes me.

Well. So. I decided not to wait another hour. This tiny car museum is the closest one to San Antonio, so if I ever really really really want to see it, I can come back someday.

Soon after that pointless stop, I realize that it's time for another bathroom break. I pulled into the first likely opportunity, a convenience store in whatever wide spot in the road came next. Once business was taken care of, I stood by the car thinking about how I felt. My mood had been getting darker and darker all day: the threat of rain, the idiot light, the lousy convenience-store tacos .... I had been thinking of abandoning the trip already, then decided that I had to at least go to KC to unload the stained glass in my trunk and stock up on cigarettes (Missouri's tobacco tax is only 19⍧ a pack; every other state charges at least a dollar-a-pack tax, so I prefer to buy in Missouri or on Indian reservations out west). Maybe at that point I'll bin the rest of the trip. We'll see.

And then I realize: it's the audiobook. I'd chosen Robert Reich's book from a couple of years ago, The Common Good, to listen to. He was Clinton's Secretary of Labor, and I've occasionally read some of his editorials on line. The man thinks deeply and writes well; and I've seen him on TV interview shows, and know he speaks well, too. I had hoped he could also read well. (Some authors should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to read their own works out loud.) He can, except where he tries to do imitations and accents (of Ayn Rand, and the Donald, and Alexis de Tocqueville). I had expected this book to be a long essay on the common good and why it's important to consider it; and to some extent, it is. But it is also a long litany of every major scandal, political, economic, or legal, that's taken place since Watergate. It just was too much to listen to. So I cut it off, returned it to the library, and listened to music for the next hour or so. My mood improved dramatically. Then, after my next stop, I started listening to Ron & Clint Howard's memoir of growing up as child actors. (Ron Howard, of course, was Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and Richie Cunningham on Happy Days; his little brother Clint was the lead actor on Gentle Ben, a show I never watched.) This is a much more upbeat accompaniment.

1936 Dodge

I made it to Weatherford in time to go through the Vintage Car Museum, a free (donations requested) car museum just off the courthouse square. It has only about twenty cars on display, about a third of which are Ford Model T's, which interest me not at all. Notable vehicles on display (they do have others, but space is limited) are a custom-built Cadillac "bus," one of a fleet built for the Broadmoor Hotel; LBJ's 1964 white Lincoln Continental convertible; and a 1939 Alvis, the lone non-American vehicle in the place. Unfortunately, all three rooms have glass walls on one side, which means almost all the cars are so harshly backlit that it's very difficult to get decent pictures. The attendant on duty was personable, and tried to be helpful, but couldn't answer any of my questions. (What was that little crank on the back of the front seat in the Dodge? What is a "pop-out ignition"? What was that gizmo on the spare-tire holder that looks like an over-engineered clamp? What's that little flipper-like knob inside the back doors, but not the front doors, of the Studebaker?) I threw a few bucks in the collection box and stepped out into the tail end of a solid rain, played with my phone for a few minutes until it stopped, then headed on.

The Bowie Knife

My last planned stop was at the World's Largest Bowie Knife in -- wait for it -- Bowie, Texas, a town which didn't exist in Jim Bowie's lifetime or for fifty years afterwards. The knife -- duly certified as the largest by the Guinness Book -- is twenty feet long and stands at the entrance to the town, by the soccer fields. It's surrounded by signboards giving bits of history about the area, mostly to do with the Chisholm Trail, but includes a description of the original Bowie knife, which, if the description is accurate, did not look like the giant example for which the town's generous citizens paid some $180,000 five or six years ago. Well, let's not quibble. It's a big knife, and it's in Bowie, so it's a Bowie Knife.

My first stop in the morning is another car museum, in Nocona, just south of the Red River. It doesn't open until 9AM tomorrow, so I checked into a cheap motel for the night and spent about an hour and a half checking over my pictures from today and writing this post. Now it's tme to go find something decent for dinner. Wish me luck.

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