Travelogue - 5 Day Diary

Tues May 7 Wilson Recreation Area, Kansas

Tripometer 1366 miles

Friday May 3 – Harmonie State Park, Indiana

The mosquitos were constantly obnoxious and the real deal.  However, we managed a 4 mile hike to the Wabash River which didn’t disappoint and our campfire kept a respectable number of mosquitos away.  First night for S’mores on this adventure.

Saturday May 4 – Cahokia Mounds visit and bike ride around the grounds. 

Wow what a place!  I came here as a kid on an elementary school field trip. I lived mostly  near St. Louis until I was 14 years old.  This was a Native American city of great proportions but you don’t seem to hear about it very much.  They built big mounds, more like pyramids really, and this place thrived from around 700 CE to 1400 CE.  It peaked around 1100 CE with a population of around 20,000.  For some perspective, at that same time London had a population of around 15,000.  The city covered 6 square miles at it’s peak and had at least 120 mounds.  Some were burial sites, others were used for religious rites.  We downloaded a cool app that let us see what the ancient mounds and grounds would have looked like back in the day using AR.

They used to play and gamble on a game called Chunkey.  Think bigger than football sized fields/arenas. It was played by rolling disc-shaped stones down the field and then running after them and throwing spears at them in an attempt to land the spear as close to where the stone will stop as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunkey

Just before we arrived at Cahokia Mounds we passed a horse racing track where we saw jockeys warming up their horses and a line of cars waiting to get into the parking lot to watch and bet on the races.  Some things never change.

We camped on my Uncle and Aunt’s farm in Warrenton, Missouri.  Eloise loved the zip line, the farm pond full of monster channel catfish, the 13 new baby chicks, and collecting eggs from the chickens.  She asked if we could stay a month. Ha. 

Sunday May 5  - We left the Missouri Reed’s homestead laden with fresh eggs and and enough honey from their beehives to last the trip.  Our stop along the route today was in Topeka, KS to visit the Monroe School.  It is the historic black school whose students were the basis of the Supreme Court case, Brown vs The Board of Education (of Topeka, KS).

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/brown-v-board-of-education

We arrived at Wilson State Park in Kansas amidst much wind and to discover of first “issue” of the trip.  Boy were we lucky.  We have a big 6 foot x 3 foot solar panel on the roof of the airstream.  When we arrived at our campsite I noticed that it was being held to the roof by only a single rivet.  It is supposed to be held firmly in place by 6 mounting brackets and 12 rivets.  Just a few miles more and I suspect it would have been road kill and possibly caused some major traffic incidents.  We borrowed a ladder from the camp host to assess the damage, develop a plan to fix, and execute.  Time will tell how well our fix serves us.  It involves more rivets ( the life blood of an Airstream) as well as using wire on some of the former rivet holes as a secondary line of defense.  We have more rivets and a telescoping ladder arriving to our next stop – Denver.

Monday May 6  -  We tossed straps over the solar panel to hold it down while the 27 mph wind storm blew for most of the day.  It also came with a Tornado Watch – hello Kansas.  By nightfall the storm had passed and we took a bike ride as well as a long walk along the lake shore.  There is lots of sandstone as well as limestone and we often found fossils in the rocks dating back 80 million years.

Tuesday May 7 –

I rode the Switchback Epic trail.  It’s 22 miles of singletrack mountain biking trail and it was gorgeous and flowy. A number of times along the trail I encountered limestone fence posts - this area of Kansas is also known as Post Rock country.  Starting in the late 1800’s the cattle farmers did and still do use cut limestone as fence posts harvested from a quarry because – there are no trees to make fence posts from.  In the afternoon after Eloise finished homeschool we drove 9 miles into the quirky and fun grassroots art village of Lucas, KS.