After almost three months in the South we left North Carolina in late July to return to California. We took our time because there were people and things that we wanted to see along the way. We first headed to Des Moines, Iowa, to visit family there. Our route took us through West Virginia, a beautiful mountainous state, and we had some of the best Thai food of our lives in Charleston, the state capital. One of the fun aspects of travel is finding little gems in unexpected places. The next day we spent a couple of hours in Kettering and Dayton, Ohio, where Carrie lived in the late 1950s and early 1960s before her family moved to California in 1964. We found the houses where she lived, now surrounded by tall trees that were seedlings when she was a girl. In Des Moines we visited the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, which has an indoor conservatory that is especially popular on cold winter days. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.
When we left Des Moines we spent an afternoon in Hamilton, Missouri, a visit that Carrie has been anticipating for a long time. Hamilton is a small town (population 1,690) about sixty miles northeast of Kansas City, but it is remarkable because it has been transformed into a quilter’s tourist mecca. Downtown, only about three blocks long, has been taken over by the Missouri Star Quilt Company. There are a dozen fabric shops downtown, all owned by Missouri Star, and each shop has a different theme, such as batik or seasonal holiday fabrics. Missouri Star has completely revived the economy in Hamilton and the surrounding area since its founding fifteen years ago. Hamilton is also the hometown of J.C. Penney. The small house where he grew up is preserved just off the main street downtown.
We spent a day in Kansas City so we could visit the National WWI Museum and Memorial, billed as the world’s most comprehensive WWI collection. We both learned a great deal about the war, the events in Europe that led up to it, and the later events that led to US involvement in 1917. But before visiting the museum we had lunch at Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque, arguably the most famous barbeque restaurant in the United States and a key player in the Kansas City-style barbeque tradition. There are photos on the wall of visiting dignitaries such as Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and John McCain. The food was great and the place was already crowded at 11 AM on a Sunday, likely due to a Royals baseball game that afternoon.
We drove across Kansas the next day and spent the next night in Colby, Kansas, a small town in the western part of the state, where we had another culinary surprise – a really great taco truck. Who knew you could get great tacos in Kansas? The next day presented us with a new adventure, the first in our travels – a flat tire! We were turning into a gas station in Aurora, Colorado, and hit a horrendous pothole, which blew out the sidewall of the left front tire. Fortunately there was a tire store just across the parking lot so we were back on the road with a new tire in about two hours. But to make the story weird, just ten days later in Fresno we hit another pothole and blew out the sidewall of the same tire. In almost 150,000 miles of driving we had never had a flat tire and now we had two in ten days. The guy in the tire store in Fresno told Charlie that if it happens again he should buy a lottery ticket.
The next day in Colorado we spent the morning in Colorado National Monument, just outside Grand Junction in western Colorado. We enjoyed a morning hike among the beautiful red cliffs, before the day got too hot to enjoy.
The next morning we spent some time at Cedar Breaks National Monument in southern Utah. That day happened to be our 49th wedding anniversary, and we had visited Cedar Breaks on our honeymoon, along with Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks.
When we returned to California we visited our friends near Paso Robles, where our car had been stranded by a flash flood last winter. We retrieved a few of our belongings that still remained, and we experienced a small earthquake while we were there. The San Andreas Fault is about fifty miles to the east, and it continues to shift every now and then.
